7

“That’s game over, Arita—no, Silver Crow.”

These were the first words spoken by Seiji Nomi at their initial meeting.

If you set north as up, Umesato Junior High School was shaped like an H on its side, with the main gate to the east. Of the two vacant spaces wedged in between the crossbar Sports Wing—which connected the northern Special Classroom and the southern General Classroom wings—the eastern section was called the “front garden” while the western section was the “courtyard.”

In this courtyard, rows of incredibly ancient camphor and oak trees stretched along all sides, making the garden dim even during the day. It had no benches or lawns, so the majority of students never went near it, and there were no social cameras.

Immediately after first period on Monday, Haruyuki received a text mail from Nomi, inviting him to meet in this courtyard. At the end of the short text, in a tiny font, he saw the word alone, and he immediately glanced over Takumu’s back, seated ahead of him in a row to the right.

Haruyuki hadn’t, in the end, been able to tell Takumu about the shower room incident the previous day. He was good up to the part about being infected with the virus and charging into the girls’ side, but he would have to touch on the fact that he had run into Chiyuri if he was to explain how he managed to make it out alive. However, Chiyuri herself had forbidden him to speak of it, so to keep that bit secret, he would have to lie, no matter how he told the story.

He absolutely did not want to lie to Takumu. But he could also easily understand that Chiyuri didn’t want to be embarrassed by it any more than she already was. And now, as he moaned and groaned, torn between his loyalties to both of his friends, he was called out by the instigator of the whole situation himself. Bowing to the inevitable, Haruyuki decided he would report to Takumu after the face-to-face. And the mail insisted he come alone.…If he went with Taku, Nomi wouldn’t show.

When the designated time arrived—the twenty-minute break between second and third periods—Haruyuki got up from his seat and flew out into the hallway. He ran down the stairs, grabbed his sneakers from the shoe lockers, headed down the gravel path alongside the gym, and stepped into the courtyard.

It wasn’t a particularly happy place for him. It was outside the range of the social cameras, and those bullies had made him come here far too many times. His memories of this place were all miserable—being shoved around, falling on his ass on top of wet, fallen leaves.

But that’s all in the past. The me now is different from the me then, he murmured to himself as he walked over to the remarkably thick Mongolian oak in the middle of the gloomy copse. He heard the crunch of footfalls, and a person appeared from the other side of the oak, facing him.

Convinced as he was that he would be the first to arrive, Haruyuki was momentarily taken aback at this, and he took a half step in retreat. Now that they were face-to-face, he could see that Seiji Nomi was indeed fairly small in stature. Even compared with Haruyuki, who was slightly below average in his class, Nomi was yet another ten centimeters shorter. His limbs, his torso, and his neck—equipped with a dark gray Neurolinker—were all slim like those of a child. He probably weighed half of what Haruyuki did; his face, too, was cherubic enough to be mistaken for that of a girl. So much so that, despite having memorized the face from the photo Takumu sent, Haruyuki wondered for a moment if this could really be the person who had set such a ruthless trap for him.

Nomi bowed lightly, soft, bowl-cut hair swinging. The smile that started on his small, neatly shaped lips spread to big, beautiful eyes fringed with long eyelashes.

“That’s game over, Arita—no, Silver Crow.”

So said Seiji Nomi.

“Huh? Wh-what is?” Attacked and caught off guard, Haruyuki could only stammer a question in response.

“The match. My victory,” Nomi said, smile still dancing across his face, and he shrugged his slender shoulders.

“What are you— Victory…” Haruyuki took a deep breath, got his thoughts in order, and scowled at his opponent. “We haven’t had a duel yet. Because you’ve got something set up so you don’t show up on the matching list.”

“There’s no need for duels and the like anymore. As long as I have this.” Nomi pulled his right hand out of his pocket and made a show of fiddling with his virtual desktop. A holo-dialogue confirming the receipt of a file blinked in Haruyuki’s vision.

“Please be reassured. It doesn’t contain any viruses.”

“……” Unable to readily trust that, Haruyuki glared at Nomi with suspicious eyes. In a whisper, he asked, “How did you apply a visual mask to my Neurolinker?”

“Goodness! You even managed to figure that out? Then as your reward, I shall reveal the secret. It was the photo! The photo! Takumu Mayuzumi forwarded one to you, didn’t he?”

“Th-the photo?” As soon as he heard the word, Haruyuki belatedly understood. The group photo he had gotten from Takumu, of the new seventh grade students on the kendo team. Right before he opened it, he had definitely had the thought that it was a ridiculously huge file.

“I was the one who embedded the name tags. And it’s a simple matter to embed a program to tamper with vision along with tags, because the Neurolinker image viewer and the augmented reality information display use the same engine,” Nomi explained with a smile, but Haruyuki, given what he knew from his own recent low-level forays into the programming aspects of a Neurolinker, was pretty sure that this “simple matter” required some high-level skill.

Most likely, Nomi here was, like Kuroyukihime and the Red King Niko, an expert Burst Linker whose appearance and mental age no longer matched up. It would be a mistake to underestimate him just because he was younger.

As he made this mental note, he timidly accepted the file Nomi had sent—after also launching more than just the default virus checker on it this time. Nomi had forwarded what appeared to be a short video. He checked before playing it, but there was nothing unnatural about the file size given the resolution and length. Pinching his lips together tightly, he hit the icon with a fingertip.

A square play window opened, filling his vision. The image projected was clear, although there was a little noise. It appeared to be a school hallway recorded from a high vantage point.

It seemed to be in the basement, as there were no windows on the walls to either side. The hall didn’t go very far; indeed, not too far ahead, at the end of the leftmost wall, there stood an entrance with no door. This quickly split to the left and the right, with two signs lined up on the wall at the bifurcation point: boys in light blue and girls in pink. This was—

The entrance to the shower rooms in the gym basement.

The instant he realized this, Haruyuki felt fairly certain he knew what he would be seeing next in the video. All the same, goose bumps broke out on his arms and up his back.

A second later, from the lower right, a round male student inched into the frame. Hair an unkempt mess. Aluminum silver Neurolinker. Arriving at the shower room entrance in the center of the screen, the boy glanced back at the camera. The face captured from head-on belonged to none other than Haruyuki.

After hesitating briefly, the Haruyuki in the video proceeded at a trot down the right-hand passage, following the girls’ sign.

“Goodness! I was quite surprised!” Nomi’s cheerful voice reached Haruyuki, who simply stood vacantly once the video ended, face drained of color. “Normally, you’d realize the mistake when you saw that everything inside was pink and come running out! And yet you just did not come out. I really wondered what I should do.”

What Nomi meant by this was a mystery, but Haruyuki first had to deal with the unbelievable fact that the video itself existed. “Y-you…,” Haruyuki squeezed out hoarsely. “How did you…There was nowhere to hide in that hallway…”

Nomi chuckled as if this were actually very funny, and then shook his head. “Kids these days…At least, that’s the sort of thing I’d like to say right now. You don’t think that the only portable devices in this world are Neurolinkers, do you? They’ve been selling things like this for at least ten years now.” He plucked from his pocket a streamlined device, lens inlaid on the front surface and small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. “Well, I guess when you say digital camera these days, it’s all about those large-diameter SLRs. But this little thing has more than enough resolution. After all, anyone can tell that it’s you in the video. I set it up on top of the tool shelf in the hall.”

“You…You did all this to get me out of this school…?” Haruyuki asked, half automatically, staring dumbfounded at the toylike machine. “Are you trying to force me to drop out?”

“No, no, of course not! Not at all!” The cute, round eyes grew even rounder, and he shook his head, almost as if to say, Don’t be ridiculous! “How would it profit me to have you drop out? No, all this effort would be wasted if you, pushed to such despairing lengths, were to attack me in the real. I was just thinking that from now on, at school”—Nomi Seiji paused for a beat, and a cherubic, and yet excessively cunning and controlled, smile filled his face—“you, Arita, could be my faithful and diligent dog. My obedient pet, bringing me the Burst points I use each day.”

“I won’t let you do that.”

The voice shook the heavy air of the courtyard.

Haruyuki shrank back with a start, and Nomi, smile still strong, turned to face the direction from whence the words had come.

Appearing from the depths of the stand of trees was Chiyuri, catlike eyes blazing. There was no Takumu next to her. Somehow, she must have followed Haruyuki and overheard the entire conversation.

Chiyuri approached them, crunching along the underbrush, until she confronted Nomi at an extremely close range.

“I called Haru from inside the girls’ shower room,” Chiyuri snapped with a sharp tongue. “I’ll testify to that if you make that video public. Maybe I did it because I happened to fall and twist my ankle so I couldn’t stand up? Then Haru would have had a perfectly valid reason for going into the girls’ side. Which means, of course, he wouldn’t be suspended or expelled.”

Haruyuki forgot his predicament and opened his eyes wide in mute amazement. Her explanation certainly was persuasive. Moreover, if he had been there for peeping purposes, it would be ridiculous to slip in through the front so obviously.

However.

Even after Chiyuri closed her mouth, Nomi’s thin smile did not disappear.

He smoothly tucked away the small video camera before bringing his hands together in a slow, insincere applause. “That’s good, that’s quite good, Kurashima,” he said. “That is, for a brand-new acceleration user still wet behind the ears.”

“Quit with the bluffing. That video you took is completely useless now.”

“Hmm, I wonder about that. For instance…” Nomi popped a single finger up in a theatrical gesture. “What if right about now, a hidden camera were to be discovered in a locker in the girls’ shower room? The whole school would certainly be in an uproar. And if this video were to be uploaded to the local net after they started looking for the perpetrator…I wonder if you would be able to really cover for Arita, Kurashima?”

“……!” Haruyuki took a sharp breath together with Chiyuri. “You wouldn’t…To go that far,” he gasped, mouth dry, and suddenly, a red light began flashing before his eyes.

The words emergency report began scrolling across the top of his vision in a pompous, excessively bolded Mincho font, and the ringing of bells filled his ears, without leaving him even the time to be surprised. Unlike the bell for the start of class, the tone of this ringing was tinged with a sense of urgency. It was followed by an announcement in a synthetic female voice.

“This emergency announcement is from the Umesato Junior High School administrative division. As of the present moment, all student access to the following areas will be limited. Students in these areas are requested to leave promptly. To repeat…”

A transparent, 3-D map of Umesato then filled his view. An area in the center was colored bright red. The gym basement and hallway area. Naturally, the girls’ shower room was also included.

Even after the image shrank to a small icon and he could see the world around him again, Haruyuki continued to stare in astonishment at his nemesis’s face.

“It seems that the camera was finally found,” the brand-new seventh grader said brightly, smile unchanged. “But I suppose that’s only natural; I did set it to start making a shutter sound right about now.”

His voice was half drowned out by the commotion erupting throughout the school building to the south.

“You…,” Chiyuri murmured, almost inaudibly, staggering back a step. “Are you insane? Doing…Doing something so huge…All for the sake of just a game…”

“I’d like to ask you something myself, Kurashima. Do you really think that Brain Burst is ‘just a game’?”

Haruyuki watched as, in an instant, Nomi’s smiling face, so cheerful to that point, changed completely. The corners of his mouth were yanked up sharply, and a cold light spilled out from his narrowed eyes. His tongue flicked out to lick his lower lip, as if he were throwing it out to make fun of them.

Chiyuri’s entire body shook, and Nomi’s right hand shot out like a snake to grab the blue ribbon at her chest. Ribbon casually in hand, he yanked her over roughly.

“Aaah?!” Chiyuri released a thin cry, pulled so close to Nomi that their noses were almost touching.

“Please don’t ever speak so rudely to me again.” His cool voice housed both a childish quality and resolute determination. “You have no choice but to obey me. If you want to help Arita, that is…That said, being at level one, you won’t be able to earn me many points, Kurashima.”

Slipping suddenly and smoothly behind Chiyuri, Nomi wrapped his left arm tightly below her chest. He rested his chin on her shoulder and murmured directly into her ear. “Rather than a hunting dog, I’ll make you a beloved lap dog. When I fight duels, you will ensure you are in the Gallery to wait upon me. Heh-heh-heh…my own pet, not even the six kings have that. Oh, don’t worry. I’m not intending to make you do anything in the real world. For now, at least.”

With each word from Nomi’s mouth, Haruyuki’s temple throbbed powerfully. He didn’t realize right away that the strange creaking sound was the squealing of his own teeth grinding.

“You…bastard,” Haruyuki growled, and went to take a step forward.

“Who said you could move, dog—I mean, Arita.” He let the contemptuous words fly with a cold laugh. “I told you at the start, this is game over. You don’t have any options left. Please be a good boy and sit there quietly for a moment.” As he spoke, Nomi took something long and thin out of his blazer pocket. Haruyuki didn’t have to look closely to quickly see that it was an XSB cable. And what its target was.

Readjusting his hold on Chiyuri’s body from behind with his left arm, Nomi brought the small plug toward her neck. A thin layer of tears started to build up in Chiyuri’s wide eyes.

And then when he saw the incremental chattering of her perfectly white teeth, Haruyuki heard a noise go off inside of him and he burst forth with it.

“Bastaaaaard!!”

Before he was even aware that he was the one yelling, Haruyuki kicked off against the damp ground. He pulled his hand into an unfamiliar fist and lunged at Nomi. In the moment, he was not aware of just what he was actually doing.

He was making a real opponent yield with a real fist—with violence in the real world, in other words—to destroy his pride and make him submit to Haruyuki’s will. This was exactly the kind of lowest of low behavior that had made Haruyuki’s own life a living hell in the past, but any sense of reason or irony had flown from his head. All that existed was the impulse to pound on this boy named Nomi, who was much smaller than he was.

Nomi’s thin smile still did not disappear, even as he watched Haruyuki’s enormous bulk charging toward him. He shoved Chiyuri away, sending her crashing to the ground; crouched low; and opened his mouth slightly.

Instantly, Haruyuki grasped what his opponent was trying to do.

Accelerate. And not the usual way. Physical acceleration, dropping his consciousness into his flesh body and making it ten times faster.

The moment he realized it, Haruyuki instinctively shouted the command he had never once used before—and he did it at the same time as Nomi.

“Physical Burst!!”

Whrrrrrr. The pitch of all the sounds around him dropped. The color of the sunlight grew duller, and the density of the air increased. It was almost like being inside a colorless, transparent, but viscous fluid. A single step forward took an extremely long time.

This isn’t acceleration, it’s deceleration, he thought before quickly rejecting the idea. The command accelerated his perception by a factor of ten while his consciousness stayed in the real world. Which meant, in other words, that the speed of his own body and everything else dropped by a tenth.

Nomi, a mere meter in front of him, was also moving at a dully sluggish pace. Cold smile still pasted on his lips, he brandished his right fist. Having brought the fist up to shoulder height, he slowly pushed it forward. The trajectory of this punch, which would normally not be visible at all, could be clearly predicted now.

Haruyuki went to throw his body to the right in the gluey, heavy air. At the same time, he started to thrust his left fist up from below. His aim was to counterattack: to ram his fist into Nomi’s stomach at the same time as he dodged the boy’s attack.

Is this really a good idea? The thought popped up quietly from the froth of his thoughts, to the water’s surface of his heart. I can’t allow this; I can’t let Nomi get away with this. I mean, it’s not just me. Him going so far as to threaten and scare Chiyuri, and on top of that—what did he say? She’d be his lap dog?

I can’t let that happen. I won’t.

Haruyuki took his time in determining his target, the place where his fist should strike: Nomi’s right side.

Because of this, he was late to notice it. The fact that Nomi’s right straight moved only slightly before stopping dead as Nomi launched a left hook in its place.

A feint?! He hurried to brace his right leg and tried to shift to the left. But his center of gravity, already inclined to the right, would not return to center so easily as that.

Nomi’s left fist approached his face with a low rumble. At the same time, he opened his body up, and the right side Haruyuki was targeting danced away.

His efforts to correct its trajectory in vain, Haruyuki’s fist simply brushed past Nomi’s blazer. And then he felt Nomi’s fist touch down on the right side of his jaw.

What? This punch doesn’t hurt at all. The thought flitted through his mind right before the force of the blow pierced the several layers of fat accumulated around Haruyuki’s neck and penetrated to his lower jawbone. There, it communicated its true mass and mercilessness to his nerves. Haruyuki felt soft structure being destroyed and capillaries breaking at one-tenth regular speed. Heat and pressure slammed against him, a slow exploding, and he started to fall to the left.

At the edge of his angled vision, he watched as Nomi followed through on his punch, spun his body around, and brought his right leg up, all with the same taut power. At wits’ end, Haruyuki stared as Nomi, in an incredible motion like a frame-by-frame playback of an action movie, unleashed a spinning back kick.

The heel of his extended right leg connected with Haruyuki’s right side, dug in, and pierced deep, so deep it was scary.

For a few seconds, Haruyuki experienced pain beyond his wildest imaginings, as if an enormous pole were gradually being thrust into his stomach, as he rose lightly into the air. From the corner of his eye, he saw Chiyuri’s painfully distorted face blurred by tears. They had sprung up without him realizing it.

It was another seven seconds or so before he landed on the ground on his back.

All Haruyuki could do for the remaining thirty seconds of the Physical Burst’s command period was roll around pathetically and endure the agony.

Vvvvp. The pitch of the environmental noise returned to normal, and the glue of the air thinned back into a gas.

“Nngaah!” He gasped fiercely as his accelerated awareness dropped down to regular speed, and he found himself rolled into a ball, clutching his battered stomach. Dry heaving repeatedly, Haruyuki saw Nomi’s sneakers approach, parting the grass with a crunch.

“Aah, really now, Arita. If you had thought about it for a mere second, you would’ve realized that winning a fight in a state of physical acceleration depends entirely on reading your opponent and feinting, now wouldn’t you? And that you had never actually fought anyone before? In which case, I suppose there was no need for me to use the command. Which means I just wasted five points.” He stopped right in front of Haruyuki, placed his right foot on Haruyuki’s shoulder, and then kicked him hard in the stomach. “Three minutes until next period? Well, I suppose we’ve got time. I will respond to your request and be your opponent, Arita.”

“Oppo…nent…?” Haruyuki groaned, enduring the dull pain that was finally abating. This is enough already. What now?

The answer to his unspoken question came not in words, but in the glitter of an approaching XSB plug.

Nomi stooped, stepped on Haruyuki’s back with his left foot, stabbed the plug into Haruyuki’s Neurolinker, and yelled, “Burst Link!!”