2

Right, it was all a dream. Including the meeting on the local net yesterday, Haruyuki thought as he entered the classroom the next day (a Wednesday), having come to school with a glum face as always.

Araya and his thugs kept sending Haruyuki prank mails during a class that was more déjà-vu than anything else. Being shaken down for lunch two days in a row was a first; the order was the same yakisoba and cream melon buns as the previous day. Do they really like them that much? Haruyuki wondered, closing his mail and rising out of his seat as the lunch bell rang.

Sluggishly, he headed not for the rooftop where Araya had summoned him but the lounge next to the student cafeteria on the first floor of the school.

Unlike the closely packed, long, cheap tables that littered the cafeteria, refined, round white tables were arranged spaciously around the semicircular lounge. With its unbroken view of the trees in the courtyard dyed in autumn colors on the other side of its large window, the lounge was without a doubt the most elegant space at Umesato Junior High School.

Thus, it was an unwritten rule that grade-seven students were not allowed to use it. The ribbons and neckties of the students gathered around the tables were all blue (grade eight) or dark red (grade nine), with not a spot of green to be found.

Half of the students were laughing and chatting with cups of coffee or tea in one hand while the other half, eyes closed, had entrusted their bodies to the tall-backed chairs. They weren’t sleeping; they were on full dives in the school net.

Haruyuki first hid his large body awkwardly behind the decorative plant at the entrance to the lounge and peered around the room. He half believed she would totally not be there because the thing yesterday was a dream…but…

“…She’s here…”

He gulped down air unconsciously. At a table by the window in the very back of the lounge was gathered a particularly conspicuous group. Six students, grades eight and nine, comprised the assemblage, and when he really rubbed his eyes and looked, Haruyuki found that he knew all their faces. Likely all student council members. Each of them, boy and girl, was comely in a different way.

Among them, the one with the strongest presence was a girl with a blue ribbon wearily flipping the pages of a hardcover book. Her straight hair, nearly down to her waist, was a jet black rarely seen these days, while the legs peeking out from her dark gray pleated skirt were wrapped in similarly black tights. For some reason, even the open-collared shirt under her blazer was a brilliant black. No mistake, this was the most popular girl at Umesato Junior High: Kuroyukihime.

If you moved in a straight line, the table in the back was probably no more than twenty meters from the lounge entrance. But to Haruyuki, the distance might as well have been infinite. There was absolutely no way he could undertake the hazardous journey of cutting through the seniors to get there.

Do a right about-face and get out of here. Buy the bread and the yogurt at the cafeteria counter, and take it to Araya and them on the roof. Then hide out in the toilet in the second school building and kill some empty hours in a single-player game on the local net.

Shit. Dammit. I’ll go.

Clenching his teeth, Haruyuki came out from behind the plant and stepped into the lounge.

It was no persecution complex; the eyes of the seniors gathered around the tables definitely held hints of reproach and displeasure. He might have gotten a pass if he had just started school or something, but halfway through the second term, he should have been fully aware of the rule that grade-sevens were not allowed.

Fortunately, no one raised their voice in reproach against him. He intently carried his heavy body forward on trembling legs, slipping through the tables, breathing becoming faint, until he finally arrived at the very back table the student council members were occupying.

The first to raise her face was an eighth-grade girl sitting in the very front. Tilting her head and causing ripples in her light hair, she turned a smiling, slightly puzzled face toward Haruyuki and said gently, “Oh…did you need something?”

Unable to get a yes out, Haruyuki mumbled, “Er…um…uh…”

At that moment, four of the other council members looked over at Haruyuki. Their faces contained no malice, but the displeased looks from around the table were hard to handle. Just when he was about to pass out from sheer nervousness, the final person at the table at last raised her face from her book.

Kuroyukihime’s face, which he was seeing for the first time up close and with his flesh-and-blood eyes, was orders of magnitude more beautiful than the avatar he had seen (supposedly) yesterday. Below sharply defined eyebrows under neatly trimmed bangs were eyes that looked black even as they shone brightly. If her avatar was a black rose, then she was a black narcissus. Although he didn’t know if anything like that even existed.

Haruyuki steeled himself for a look of What is this ugly grade-seven? to appear on this beautiful face. But, surprising him to the core of his being, Kuroyukihime brought that slight smile he remembered to her pale lips and said briefly, “Well, boy. You came.”

She closed the hardcover book with a snap and invited Haruyuki, still standing stiffly, to join her, as she glanced around at the other council members at the table.

“I’m the something. Sorry, can you vacate?”

The last part was directed at the ninth-grade boy sitting next to her. When the tall senior with short hair stood up with a bemused look on his face, she directed Haruyuki to the chair with the palm of her hand.

Mumbling his thanks, Haruyuki pulled his round body in as much as possible and lowered himself onto the seat. The slender chair creaked magnificently, but Kuroyukihime appeared not to notice at all and, after digging around in the left pocket of her blazer, pulled out something long and thin.

It was a cable. A thin, silver line, with small plugs at both ends of the shielded cord. After bringing her long hair around to the back with her left hand and inserting one plug into the terminal of the Neurolinker (naturally painted piano black) attached to her surprisingly thin neck, Kuroyukihime casually offered the other plug to Haruyuki. Now a large stir arose among the students in the lounge, all of whom had been carefully studying these events. Mixed in with the din were cries of something akin to distress: “No way!” and “She can’t be serious.”

Haruyuki was equally taken aback. Beads of sweat appeared suddenly on his face.

Direct wired transmission.

Kuroyukihime was inviting Haruyuki to “direct.” Normally, communication happened only through Neurolinkers wirelessly connected to that area’s network server, with several layers of security as intermediaries. Connecting directly with a wire, however, rendered 90 percent of these protective barriers useless. If you had the Linker skills, you could peek into the other user’s private memory and even set up a malevolent program.

Which is why, normally, directing was limited to people the user trusted implicitly: family, maybe lovers. Put another way, 99 percent of male/female couples directing in public were dating. Even the length of the cable reflected this level of intimacy, in a custom that had no scientific foundation.

The XSB cable Kuroyukihime was currently holding out was about two meters long, so the problem in this case wasn’t the length. Staring fixedly at the glittering silver terminal, Haruyuki managed somehow to squeeze his voice through his throat and ask, “Uh…um, what am I supposed to…”

“You can’t do anything besides stick it in your neck, can you?” she asserted without missing a beat.

Very close to passing out now, Haruyuki took the plug with a shaky hand and fumbled to put it in his own Neurolinker. The moment he did, a warning flashed in front of his eyes: WIRED CONNECTION. As this message faded, only the figure of Kuroyukihime before him was alive against the backdrop of the lounge.

Although her lips, still toying with a faint smile, did not move a millimeter, her smooth voice sounded in Haruyuki’s brain. “Sorry to ask you to come all the way over here, Haruyuki Arita. Can you neurospeak?”

The skill of having a conversation without moving your lips, going only through the Linker. Haruyuki nodded and replied, “I can. Um…what exactly is this about? Some kind of elaborate…prank or something?”

He thought she might get mad, but Kuroyukihime tilted her head slightly to the side and murmured softly, “I suppose…in a certain sense, that’s probably exactly it. Because right now, I am sending an application program to your Neurolinker. If you accept it, the world you have known until now will be completely and utterly destroyed and then rebuilt into something you can’t even conceive.”

“M-my world…destroyed…?” Haruyuki repeated, dumbstruck.

Already, the student council members at the table were staring with deep interest in where this would go and the students making a fuss around them had essentially disappeared from his view. Only Kuroyukihime’s words reverberated in his brain over and over.

The student clad in black smiled again at Haruyuki’s confusion, raised her right hand, and quickly flicked the tip of her supple, pale finger.

Followed by a beeping sound.

And holo dialogue: OPEN BRAIN BURST2039.EXE? YES/NO

Despite the fact that this was supposedly his own familiar system display, Haruyuki almost felt like the window had its own secret, independent will and was pressing him for a decision.

In terms of common sense, opening an unknown app sent by a direct connection from a person you didn’t know very well was the very definition of indiscretion. The obvious thing to do would be to yank out the cable right now. But Haruyuki couldn’t do that for some reason. Instead, he looked down at his own body, wedged in tightly on the chair.

My world. My reality.

This dull body. Dull face. Endless bullying, escaping to the net. And more than anything else, me doing absolutely nothing to change any of it. My own self, giving up. I just tell myself it’s fine this way and nothing’s going to change anyway.

Haruyuki shifted his gaze and stared into Kuroyukihime’s pitch-black eyes. And then after a five-second pause, he raised his right hand and poked the YES button with the tip of his finger. He saw her white face suddenly colored with a slight surprise, and a slight satisfaction dripped into his heart.

“Just what I was hoping for. As long as this world…breaks,” he mumbled, while at nearly the same time, an enormous blaze leapt up to fill his field of vision. The wild flames that had engulfed him, causing him to stiffen up instinctively, finally focused in front of him to form a title logo. The design style was definitely nothing new, with a roughness that brought to mind a certain type of fighting game in fashion at the end of the last century.

The text that appeared: BRAIN BURST.

This was how Haruyuki and the program that would revolutionize the world he knew met.

The installation continued for nearly thirty seconds. For a Neurolinker app, it was pretty huge.

Haruyuki swallowed hard and stared as the indicator bar displayed below the burning title logo finally reached 100 percent. Kuroyukihime had said it would destroy his world. What did that actually mean?

The indicator disappeared, and the logo vanished as if it had burnt itself up. The remaining orange flames produced text reading WELCOME TO THE ACCELERATED WORLD in a small English font, which quickly turned into sparks and scattered. What did that mean: accelerated world?

For ten seconds or so, Haruyuki sat and held his breath, waiting for something to happen. However, no sign or omen of the change to come appeared either in his body or in the scene around him. As usual, sweat was trickling down under his uniform, and the critical gazes inflicted on him from the surrounding tables seemed to grow even more intense.

Letting out a long, thin breath, he looked at Kuroyukihime suspiciously. “Um…this Brain Burst program, what exactly…?” he asked in neurospeak, and the black-clad senior murmured something far removed from Haruyuki’s doubts, the smile on her lips never disappearing.

“So you’ve managed to install it. Although I was certain you had the aptitude for it.”

“A-aptitude? For this program?”

“Mm. Brain Burst can’t even be installed in people without high-level cerebral nerve reaction speed. For instance, high enough to get an absurd score in a virtual game. When you saw those phantom flames, the program was checking your brain’s reactions. If you didn’t have the aptitude, you wouldn’t have even been able to see the title logo. But…still, you surprised me somewhat. After all, the old me hesitated for nearly two minutes about whether or not I should accept such a dubious program. I worked out a whole speech to persuade you, and it seems that I wasted my time.”

“O-oh…I’m sorry. But, um, it…it doesn’t seem like anything’s happening. Is it an app you launch instead of a resident app?”

“Don’t be impatient. You need to mentally prepare yourself a little first. We can get to the detailed explanations once you do. We have plenty of time.”

Haruyuki glanced at the clock continuously displayed in the bottom right of his field of vision. Lunch break was already nearly half over. It didn’t exactly seem like they had so much time as all that.

Almost painfully aware of the way the room around him was a mix of curiosity and disgust, Haruyuki leaned forward. The chair beneath him groaned. It was a sound he was used to hearing, but it almost felt as if even the chair were laughing at how ugly and ridiculous he was, and he bit his lip. No one could possibly love him the way he was now. If he could change everything, he’d do it, no matter what the change ended up being.

“I’m already prepared. Please tell me what this program is—” He had gotten this far when the voice he least wanted to hear rang out from the lounge entrance behind him.

“Hey! Pi—Arita! You got a job to do!!”

Reflexively, he flinched and jumped out of his seat. He turned around to see Araya standing red-faced in front of him, even though he normally never came down from the roof before the end of lunch.

At the same time as the expression on Haruyuki’s face shifted from shock to terror, Araya’s shifted from rage to doubt. By standing up, Haruyuki had revealed the slender figure of Kuroyukihime, who had been completely hidden in his enormous shadow, along with the cable extending from her Linker and connecting to Haruyuki’s.

Even frozen in place, Haruyuki was keenly sensitive to the nearly imperceptible shift in the mood of everyone around him except the members of the student council. They must have all instantly grasped the nature of the relationship between the large Araya wearing the same green necktie as Haruyuki, small vertically but big horizontally. But the mood of the students was of course not a reproach of Araya, but rather a sense of consensus, as if to say, Oh, of course.

Stop. Just stop now, Haruyuki fervently chanted to himself. He seriously hated the idea that Kuroyukihime would know he was being bullied. He offered a stiff smile to Araya with the intention of communicating that once his business here was finished, he would go right away to buy the buns and come up to the roof, so please just be quiet and wait a minute or two.

Upon seeing this, Araya’s florid face grew even redder in fury. Haruyuki shuddered as he watched Araya’s lips move to form the word pig soundlessly. He had completely misunderstood the meaning of the smile on Haruyuki’s lips as he directed with the most popular student in school.

Eyes glittering as he raised them, Araya slipped without a word through the hedges separating the cafeteria from the lounge. He approached in a straight line, stepping on the heels of his indoor shoes and making a scuffing sound. Subordinates A and B trailed after him, slightly nervous looks on their faces.

It’s all over, Haruyuki thought, taking a step backward.

Araya was so tall and sculpted of solid muscle from karate that it was hard to believe he was also thirteen. On this body, he wore a too-short blazer and a light purple shirt that was conversely way too long, and his pants too were sloppily wide. His hair, dyed a nearly white gold, stood up in points like the flower holders in flower arrangements, and with his very thin eyebrows, piercings decorating both ears, and his almond eyes, he was the very definition of danger.

Umesato Junior High School was a high-level private school focused on getting kids into university, but in this era of extremely low birth rates, almost no junior high schools still had entrance examinations. Thus, martial artists like Araya sometimes signed up with the idea of an easy ride.

Having been easily taken down by this type since his first day of school, Haruyuki flinched and stared up at Araya standing in front of him, practically leaning against the smaller boy as he glowered down at him.

“You making fun of me?” As these words issued between lips twisted into a sneer, Kuroyukihime’s clear real-world voice resonated crisply and clearly before Haruyuki could try to force some menial apology from his mouth.

“You’re Araya, yes?”

After a moment’s surprise flitted across his face, Araya smiled flirtatiously. Even a guy like this could apparently be pleased that the Kuroyukihime had remembered his name. But the words that followed astonished not only Araya but Haruyuki as well.

“I heard about you from Arita. That you might have been sent to junior high school from the zoo.”

Araya’s jaw dropped suddenly, and Haruyuki stared in dazed amazement at how it trembled. “Wh-wh-wha—” The sound Araya was making was exactly what Haruyuki wanted to scream.

Wh-what are you talking about?!

However, he had no chance to give voice to that thought. Araya emitted a fierce, angry bellow. “What the hell?! That’s it! You are so dead, piiiiig!!”

Haruyuki froze with a start while Araya tightened his right hand into a fist and raised it up high. At the same moment, a sharp voice within his brain gave Haruyuki an order. “Now! Shout it! ‘Burst link’!”

Haruyuki couldn’t tell if he shouted the short command with his real voice or in neurospeak. But the sound became a vibration that seeped into every corner of his body.

“Burst link!!”

The sound of a screeching impact shook his world.

All color instantly disappeared, leaving only a transparent blue spreading out before him. The lounge, the students watching events play out with suspicious eyes, and even Araya in front of him—all were dyed a monochromatic blue.

And everything was frozen.

Haruyuki stared dumbfounded at Araya’s fist, which should have been striking him in another second, suspended a few dozen centimeters in front of him.

“Wh-whoa!!” he cried out involuntarily, leaping a step back. As a result, Haruyuki saw something even more incredible.

His own back. His own rounded back, now the same pure blue as Araya, was unnaturally frozen in a ridiculous flinching posture. It was almost like his soul alone had escaped his flesh.

In which case, what was he now?! When, shocked, he looked down, and he saw there his familiar pink pig. There was no mistake, it was the avatar Haruyuki used on the local net. No longer understanding anything about anything, he turned around unsteadily.

Where he saw yet another strange sight.

On the lounge chair, Kuroyukihime was sitting gracefully, knees neatly pressed together, back straight. However, her body and the cable stretching out from her neck, all of it was colored a transparent blue, like a crystal.

And standing next to her was her avatar, clad in the black dress with the swallowtail butterfly wings and parasol folded into it, a mysterious smile on her lips.

“Wh-what’s going on here?!” Haruyuki yelled at her, unable to hold back. “Full dive?! Or…an out-of-body experience?!”

“Ha, neither,” Kuroyukihime’s avatar informed him cheerfully. “Right now, we are operating in the Brain Burst program. We’re accelerated.”

“A…accelerated…?”

“Exactly. Everything around us looks like it has stopped, but in fact, it hasn’t. Our consciousnesses are moving at extremely high speeds.”

Kuroyukihime took a few steps, causing the silver gems decorating the hem of her dress to glint, and stopped beside the real Haruyuki and Araya, frozen and blue. With the tip of her parasol, she indicated Araya’s fist in a right straight punch trajectory. “This fist, although we can’t see it, is moving very slowly, crawling forward. Like the hour hand of a clock. If we waited like this for quite some time, it would eventually traverse these eighty centimeters, and we would be able to watch it sink slowly into your cheek here.”

“Y-you’re kidding…No, wait, I mean…J-just hold on a minute.” Haruyuki cradled his head in his pig hands and desperately tried to make sense of this information. “S-so, uh…then this means our souls haven’t actually left our bodies, right? Then all of this is just thinking happening in our heads basically?”

“You learn fast. That’s exactly it.”

“But that’s crazy! If you’re saying that just our thinking and our impressions are accelerated, then this…There’s no way I should be able to move around like some out-of-body experience and see my own back or even stand here and have a conversation with you!”

“Mm, that’s a very natural concern, Haruyuki.” Nodding professorially, Kuroyukihime swung her black hair, twisted into a long roll over her shoulder, and moved to the side of the table. “This blue world we see is the real-time world, but we are not viewing it optically. Go ahead and take a look under the table.”

“O-okay…” Haruyuki crouched down with the body of his pig, smaller than his real-world body, and peered under the blue table. “Th-that’s…”

Strange. The table was wood, and the top was shot through with a fine wood grain. But the underside was smooth like plastic, without the slightest hint of texture.

“What is this…It’s like it’s a polygon…?”

Kuroyukihime nodded casually at Haruyuki as he brought his face back up. “Exactly. This blue world is a 3-D image reconstructed from images captured by several social cameras in the lounge, and our brains are seeing it through our Neurolinkers. Areas that are blind spots for the cameras are supplemented by estimates. Which is why there is no point in trying to look up the skirt of that girl there.”

“Social cameras” were officially “social security surveillance cameras,” and the whole of Japan was covered with them, the goal the maintenance of public order. Guarded by the secure protective wall of the government’s image monitoring network, there was no way at all for the general population to sneak a look through them—or that was how it was supposed to be.

As this tidbit popped into his head, Haruyuki’s eyes reflexively followed the legs of the female student council member as they stretched out under the table, confirming that the graceful lines disappeared at the edge of her skirt.

Kuroyukihime glanced over at Haruyuki hurrying to stand up. “Don’t look at my legs. They’re in the view of the cameras.”

“I—I won’t.” Working hard to fix his gaze in one place, Haruyuki shook his head. “A-anyway, I basically get the logic of what we’re seeing. It’s a 3-D movie of the real world in real time…Using our avatars as proxies, we’re looking at stuff around us and talking via the direct connection, right?”

“Right. Your school local net avatar is being used here as a stopgap.”

“I’d rather have something else,” he mumbled, sighing heavily. He shook the pig head, got his thoughts sorted, and looked at Kuroyukihime’s avatar once again. “But…that’s only the start of it. What I really want to know…What exactly is accelerated? I’ve never heard of Neurolinkers equipped with a function that stops time like this!”

“Of course you haven’t. Only people with the Brain Burst program can call up the acceleration function hidden in the Neurolinkers,” Kuroyukihime said, almost under her breath, raising her left hand and gently nudging the extra-large Neurolinker wrapped around the neck of the frozen real Haruyuki. “Do you know the principle behind the operation of the Neurolinker, Haruyuki?”

Haruyuki nodded as he watched her touch “her” neck with a slim finger, giving him a start for some reason. “Y-yes…I don’t know all the details, but I know it connects wirelessly with your brain cells at the quantum level to send in images, sound, and sensations while simultaneously canceling out the reality of your own senses.”

“Right. In other words, the principle behind it is fundamentally different from the headgear-style virtual reality machines of the twenty-twenties or the implants of the thirties. A quantum connection is not a physiological mechanism. Thus, you don’t have the burden on the brain cells, and you get this unexpected excess…or so a certain person out there realized.”

“What do you mean…excess?”

Kuroyukihime responded with another question, as if Haruyuki’s query was slightly off the mark. “Have you ever touched a computer from the twenties?”

“Y-yeah, sure. We have one at my house.”

“Then you probably know what they called the basic operating frequency of the computers.”

“The…base clock?”

Kuroyukihime nodded with satisfaction. “Yes. Depending on the set scale, you overclocked the signal, which carved up time like a pendulum on the motherboard, to run the CPU. And human brains, our consciousness works the same way.”

“What?!” Haruyuki’s eyes widened, breath shooting out of his large pig’s nose. “N-no way! Where is this pendulum inside us, then?”

“Here,” Kuroyukihime replied immediately. Embracing the real, blue Haruyuki from the front, she poked the center of his back with her right hand, eyes upturned as if playing a joke.

“Wh-what are you doing?”

“Right now, your clock is a little faster. You probably get it already. It’s your heart! Your heart’s not merely a pump to send out blood. The beating of your heart makes it a basic clock generator determining the driving speed of your thoughts.”

Swallowing hard, Haruyuki pressed on the chest of his pig body. Kuroyukihime continued, still touching the area above his heart, almost as if she was teasing him.

“For instance, when you try to stop your body, your heartbeat will speed up depending on the situation. Like a race-car driver’s. Why? It’s because you need to accelerate your thoughts—your awareness of the situation, your judgment. Or like a pair of lovers touching each other. You accelerate to more deeply experience each minute, each second.”

Kuroyukihime slowly dragged the tip of the finger on Haruyuki’s chest upward, stopping at his neck. “With each beat of your heart, the quantum pulse signal generated is sent back to your central nervous system, driving your brain—that is, your thoughts. So what do you think happens when the Neurolinker around your neck captures that signal and overclocks you?”

Haruyuki felt a shudder run up his back. “Your thoughts…are accelerated?”

“Exactly. And the Neurolinker lets you do that. Without any kind of negative impact on your body or your brain cells. Right now, in this exact moment, our Neurolinkers are overclocking the signal generated by a single heartbeat, riding the wireless quantum signal and sending information to our brains. In fact, it’s doing so at a rate of more than a thousand times the norm!”

“A thousand…times…” Haruyuki could no longer do anything other than repeat the words fed to him, dumbfounded. In his almost drugged awareness, Kuroyukihime’s smooth voice made even more of an impact.

“Your thoughts are accelerated a thousandfold. Which means one second of reality is a thousand seconds. Do the math and you’re experiencing sixteen minutes and forty seconds.”

This was more than F1 racers. This was basically more magic to stop time than it was technology.

However, before Haruyuki could start to wonder what specifically would be possible if he were to make full use of this marvelous phenomenon, Kuroyukihime muttered, “Oh!” as if just realizing something.

“…?”

“No, sorry. I got caught up in explaining things, and I ended up using a bit too much time. I completely forgot that the real you is about to be sent flying.”

“Hah…” Haruyuki hurried to his feet and went around to the other side of his frozen blue self.

Araya’s punch had definitely moved quite a bit during the five minutes or so (or the point-three seconds) they had spent talking. It was now only less than fifty centimeters from the real Haruyuki’s round cheeks.

Araya’s face was reproduced so perfectly, lips twisting to expose his brutal excitement, that it was hard to believe it was created using images from the social cameras hidden in the ceiling.

What exactly about this is fun? No, it’s probably fun. I mean, me standing there aimlessly in front of his fist with that blank look on my face. I’m basically a bit player in his story.

Haruyuki turned back to Kuroyukihime, depressing thoughts rolling around in his brain. “So…how long does this acceleration last?”

“In theory, forever. But due to the limits of the Brain Burst program, the longest you can stay accelerated is thirty felt minutes, or one-point-eight real seconds.”

At Kuroyukihime’s cool response, Haruyuki widened his round, pink pig eyes. If his real-world self had been frozen like this for nearly two seconds, then Araya’s punch would travel the remaining distance and smash in the bridge of his nose in no time.

“H-he’s going to hit me, isn’t he?” Haruyuki cried, imagining himself being sent flying frame by frame.

But Kuroyukihime laughed lightly and added by way of explanation, “Ha-ha! Don’t worry. Of course, you can stop the accelerated state when you want to.”

“O-oh…you can? Then I better go back to reality and avoid this punch…”

“Simple. Ha-ha, this way of using acceleration is the easiest to understand. You carefully watch the situation with a reaction speed not possible in flesh and blood, and after careful deliberation, you release the acceleration and leisurely take action.”

Just as she noted, accelerated, he now understood what needed to be done given the trajectory and aim of Araya’s punch, which due to his terror he hadn’t even been able to analyze—much less avoid—the many times he had been hit before now.

Once he released the acceleration, it would be enough to move about fifteen centimeters to the left. Swallowing hard, he carved the thought into his head and looked at Kuroyukihime for the command to release the acceleration.

But before he could speak, the beautiful girl in black dropped a bomb in a light tone. “But don’t avoid it. He’s actually daring to hit you here, Haruyuki.”

“Wh—” Haruyuki’s pig nose twitched before he shouted, “I—I don’t want to! It’s going to hurt!”

“Hurt what?”

“Huh…? What do you mean ‘what’?”

“I’m asking you whether it’s going to hurt your body or your mind.”

The smile disappeared from Kuroyukihime’s avatar. Without waiting for Haruyuki’s response, she put a black high heel forward sharply.

Her slim form, nearly half a meter taller than Haruyuki’s pig body, crouched down, and Kuroyukihime stared into his eyes well within his personal space. He swallowed and stood bolt upright.

“This isn’t the first time you have been punched by this student, Araya.”

“N-no.” For some reason, Haruyuki nodded even though he had so desperately wanted her not to find out about the bullying.

“So then there are two reasons why he has not been dealt with before now. One is, of course, that you have just meekly accepted his behavior. And the other is that Araya has cleverly set the scene of his violence and extortion beyond the view of the social cameras.”

It was true that any direct bullying that happened to Haruyuki was always in places where students didn’t go, like the shadow of the ventilation units on the roof or behind the school. So that was to avoid not the eyes of other people but the cameras?

The expression on Kuroyukihime’s face was complicated, and she stretched herself upright smoothly. “Unfortunately, while they are few, there are students like him even among the eighth and ninth graders. They have their own sort of network, and apparently, an illegal app that warns them when they are in view of the social cameras is quite popular with their crowd. That lot would never give themselves away in front of the cameras. Even as a new student, he would surely have had that drilled into him.”

Glancing at Araya’s dyed blue face with eyes like ice, Kuroyukihime continued in a quiet, strong voice. “But he is still a child, after all. At my earlier provocation, he forgot himself and is lashing out violently here in front of all these cameras. Understand? This is your chance, Haruyuki. It would be easy to dodge this punch, but if you do, Araya will come to his senses and run off. Your opportunity to punish him as he deserves will again recede ever further from view.”

And then Araya would inflict further pain on Haruyuki. He could only too easily imagine that Araya’s revenge would make everything up to now look like a game. A shudder ran down his spine as Haruyuki looked at his real self and Araya’s fist approaching that face.

The thug’s bony right hand tapered to rough points, and if it hit him, it would hurt enough to make him cry. It was a pain he had become disgustingly familiar with over these last six months. But—

What had really been bleeding was not his body but his heart. His pride, which had been steadily shredded.

“Um.” Haltingly, Haruyuki asked Kuroyukihime, “If I managed to master Brain Burst, would I be able to beat him in a fight?”

All expression disappeared from her beautiful face, and she stared directly at Haruyuki. “You probably could. You’re already a Burst Linker, which means you have a power greatly exceeding that of the unaccelerated. If you were so inclined, you wouldn’t have to settle for just one punch; you could beat him for as long as you wanted.”

I am so inclined. Is there some reason I wouldn’t be?

I’ll neatly dodge Araya’s karate and make him into something even uglier than a pig. I’ll smash his nose, knock out all his front teeth, pull out every single one of those precious golden hairs from his head when he’s bowed down before me, weeping.

Clenching his teeth with a crunch, he sighed heavily and told Kuroyukihime in a shaking voice. “…No, I won’t do it. I’ll get hit like a good boy. I won’t get the chance again, after all.”

“Mm.” Smiling with satisfaction somehow, Kuroyukihime nodded slowly. “A wise choice. Now, let’s try to minimize the damage while maximizing the effect, hmm? Once the acceleration runs out, you leap back to the right with everything you’ve got. Don’t forget to turn your head to the right as his fist hits you.”

“O-okay.” Moving directly behind his real self, Haruyuki checked the trajectory of Araya’s punch. She was right, if he leapt while turning his face, he could mitigate most of the bite from Araya’s karate technique.

Nodding, he looked to see exactly what he’d be leaping into. There was a table to the left, but a large space opened up behind him to the right, with no obstacles before the big window looking out onto the courtyard. Except for one person.

“Oh no…I can’t. If I jump from here to there, I’ll end up slamming into you.”

There was only about a meter between Haruyuki standing and the real Kuroyukihime sitting on the chair. If he hit her slim form with his enormous bulk, he couldn’t be sure what would happen to her.

However, the avatar in the black dress merely shrugged lightly. “It’s not a problem; this way is more effective. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to dodge. I won’t get hurt.”

“…O-okay.” It was certainly possible to do if you knew in advance what was going to happen. He was forced to nod.

“We’re very nearly out of time here. Hurry and line up with your real self.”

She poked his back and Haruyuki took a step forward to align his pig avatar with his blue self. Kuroyukihime seemed to have sat on the chair behind him; the position of her voice was lower.

“All right. Now I’m going to teach you the command to release the acceleration. Be strong. ‘Burst out’!”

“Burst out!”

Haruyuki took a deep breath and put everything he had behind the shout.

A jetlike roar approached from a distance, shattering the surrounding silence. The blue world gradually took on its former color. In the left of his field of vision, Araya’s static fist began to move, bit by tiny bit. From a sluggish snail’s pace, it gradually sped up and drew nearer to Haruyuki’s cheek.

As he prepared to leap back to the right as instructed, pushing off with both legs, he twisted his head earnestly to the right. The punch chugging toward him touched his skin, sinking in slightly.

And then the world returned.

As the noise around him rushed in, Haruyuki felt the fist digging into his left cheek. He felt his teeth driven into the inside of his cheek, his lip splitting. It was probably bleeding a little, but the pain was definitely about half that of the other karate punches he had suffered through however many times before this.

At the same time, his large body flew spectacularly through the air action-movie style. Fervently hoping she would manage to jump clear of him, Haruyuki collided with the chair behind him. For a brief moment, he smelled something good, felt her soft hair.

The chair clattering to the floor was followed immediately by an ominous thud.

His back slamming into the floor, Haruyuki stopped breathing momentarily. Even as he gasped for air, he was yanking his head around to check on Kuroyukihime. She was supposed to have dodged, but what his widening eyes saw was her slender figure, limbs splayed out like a broken doll, eyes closed, head up against the lounge window.

Below the disheveled bangs, a single trail of blood ran down a cheek so white it was nearly translucent.

“Ah…ah!” Swallowing a scream, Haruyuki tried to stand up. But at that moment—

“Don’t move!!”

Kuroyukihime’s think voice hit his brain through his still directly connected Linker. Freezing instinctively faceup on the floor, Haruyuki responded. “B-but you’re bleeding!!”

“Don’t worry. It’s just a little cut. I told you, aim to maximize the effect. After this, you’ll never have to deal with Araya again.”

Staying still as instructed, Haruyuki moved just his eyes from left to right.

Araya, right fist still stuck out in front of him, looked down at Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime, mouth agape. The blood slowly drained from his face, and his thin lips trembled a few times, as if spasming.

The total silence that descended on the lounge was shattered by the terrible screams of the girls at the surrounding tables.

“Aaaaaaah!!”

Araya and subordinates AB put up almost no resistance when they were thrown out by the male council members. The three of them, white as ghosts, knees knocking, were half dragged away by the teachers who had come running, faces red with anger, and Kuroyukihime was taken straight to the hospital, held by another female council member.

Haruyuki himself just got a little bandaging in the health room, and as the school doctor’s hand disinfected and patched him up, the words Kuroyukihime had uttered immediately before the direct cable was pulled reverberated in his ears.

“Oops, I forgot to tell you. Do not take off your Neurolinker before you come to school tomorrow. And you can’t make a global connection, not even for a second. Got it? Under no circumstances. Promise.”

He couldn’t even begin to guess at the intent behind these instructions. The entire two hours he spent in the health room, his whole body was enveloped in a strange feeling of detachment. He had no idea how he was supposed to process and digest all of the things that had happened to him in just these past two days.

But at the very least, it seemed like he wouldn’t need to worry anymore about things like his shoes disappearing from his shoe locker or weird stuff being put in the shoes if they stayed there. Mechanically, he changed out of his school shoes into his street shoes, and when he was about to leave school grounds, he did as instructed and disconnected his Neurolinker from the net. Wondering once again what the point was, he turned toward the school gates and started walking.

“Haru!”

A small voice reached his ears, and his legs stopped short.

When he looked around, he noticed a small figure casting a shadow on the school wall, colored in the evening light. Aware of his face stiffening up involuntarily, Haruyuki said her name. “…Chiyu.”

It wasn’t that he’d forgotten. He’d forcefully chased the events of the previous day out of his head, and now they instantly replayed in the back of his brain. Ah! What should I do? Okay, I have to apologize, first things first.

As he panicked, Chiyuri Kurashima approached with a difficult look on her face, sinking slightly on the soft synthetic surface of the schoolyard.

“Uh…um…yesterday, I—”

“Haru, I heard about what happened at lunch,” Chiyuri said, cutting through Haruyuki’s flustered incoherence.

“Huh? Lunch…oh, oh!”

“I heard he hit you and you seriously went flying! Are you hurt? Are you okay?” Pulling her thick eyebrows together tightly, Chiyuri brought her face in closer, and Haruyuki unconsciously brought his left hand up to cover the bandage on his mouth. There was no way he could tell her that he was actually the one who had sent himself flying so spectacularly.

“Y-yeah, I’m okay. I just cut my lip a bit. I’m not hurt anywhere else.”

“You’re not? Oh good.”

A faint smile crossing her still terribly stiff face, Chiyuri glanced around. Apparently due to this one incident at lunch, Haruyuki had immediately become a topic of conversation at school, and the students heading home around them were all staring openly.

“Anyway, it’s good to walk home together sometimes,” Chiyuri said in a hard voice, and she started walking without waiting for an answer.

Sometimes? We haven’t done that once since we started junior high, Haruyuki thought, but if he shouted out in protest and ran off, it would just be a repeat of his stupidity yesterday. Whatever else happened, he had to apologize for that stuff.

Jogging after Chiyuri, who stalked forward in long strides unsuited to her stature, Haruyuki put a slight distance between them to walk alongside her. In this manner, they passed through the school gate and walked along the large road with only the sound of the in-wheel motors of passenger vehicles breaking the silence.

Normally as soon as Haruyuki left school, the people, bicycles, and cars moving around him were automatically marked as colored symbols in his vision, allowing him to walk even with his eyes closed, but he couldn’t use the navigation while disconnected from the global net. Just as he started to wonder again why exactly Kuroyukihime had given him an instruction like that, Chiyuri to his right casually mentioned that very name and nearly made him jump.

“I heard you were directing with Kuroyukihime in grade eight. For real?”

“What?! Th-that’s…” He was about to ask how she knew that, but, thinking better of it, realized that was about right. More than Araya and his fist, the directing probably made the bigger splash at school. “Yeah, well…”

Without even looking at him nodding, Chiyuri stuck out her small lips and started walking even faster. Haruyuki knew only too well from long experience that this was an expression of her very worst mood and wondered again why she was in such a state. To which he was again quick to tell himself that that was about right. If some idiot who had knocked over and dumped out her homemade lunch was doing weird things with some other girl without so much as an apology, it wasn’t just Chiyuri. Anyone would obviously be mad.

“B-but it wasn’t anything special. It was…I just copied an app from her.” Haruyuki tried to explain it away, an unpleasant sweat running down his back even though it was October. However, the look on Chiyuri’s face did not soften, and he began to intently put together a dialogue in his head, even more certain of the need to apologize for the sandwich incident.

“A-anyway, about…about yesterday…” He had finally gotten this much out of his mouth when they heard a voice ringing out ahead of them, and Haruyuki swallowed the rest.

“Heey! Haru! Chiii! What a coincidence. You headed home now?”

Chiyuri’s legs stopped on a dime, and Haruyuki lifted his face. He saw a boy the same age as them smiling broadly with a hand raised on the escalator leading to Kannana Ring Road.

His blue-gray uniform had a raised collar, unlike that of Umesato Junior. In his right hand, he held a refined, old-fashioned black schoolbag, and a kendo bamboo sword case was slung over his shoulder. His longish hair was parted cleanly in the middle, and the face below it was beautiful, clear—best and most aptly described as “fresh.”

“Oh…Taku.” Blinking rapidly several times, Chiyuri smiled.

Even though she was in such a bad mood. After thinking this, Haruyuki muttered his third That’s about right in his head. I mean, she did just run into her boyfriend while walking along with an annoying jerk who dropped her sandwiches.

As Haruyuki and Chiyuri’s childhood friend Takumu Mayuzumi jogged toward them, bamboo sword case bouncing, he turned a cheerful, open smile toward Haruyuki.

“Hey, Haru! It’s been ages!”

“Hey, Taku. Has it been that long?” Haruyuki asked, glancing up at Takumu’s face, ten centimeters higher than his own.

“It has. I haven’t seen you in two weeks already in meatspace. You never come to the condo events.”

“Like I’d show up at a sports meet,” he returned, screwing up his face, and Takumu laughed as if to say, You never change.

The three of them had all been born the same year in a skyscraper condo complex in Kita-Koenji. However, Haruyuki probably wouldn’t have become such good friends with this boy who had everything he didn’t based solely on that coincidence.

Ironically, it was because Takumu was so good at his studies and managed to get into a famous K–12 school in Shinjuku that Haruyuki was able to hang out with him without fear. Takumu had never had to see Haruyuki’s pathetic self targeted for bullying the second he had started at the local public elementary school.

Haruyuki had forced (or rather begged) Chiyuri, who had gone to that same elementary school, never to tell Takumu about the bullying. If he found out, Takumu might have tried to help him, calling out the gang of brats and taking them down with his bamboo sword.

But Haruyuki had the feeling that even if he stopped getting bullied, he wouldn’t be able to keep being friends with Takumu.

“That reminds me.” Haruyuki was first to open his mouth while the three of them walked side by side, something he almost never did at school. “I saw the videos of the city tournament on the net the other day. You’re amazing, Tak; only in seventh grade and already winning.”

“I was just lucky. I was super lucky,” Takumu said as he laughed, scratching his head. “The guys who would’ve given me trouble got knocked out in the prelims. And then there was Chi here coming to cheer me on.”

“What? Me?!” Chiyuri cried from the other side of Takumu, eyes wide. “I—I mean, I was just watching from the corner, that’s it.”

“Ha-ha-ha! What are you talking about? You were really hollering! Stuff like Kick his teeth in!” Takumu raised his laughing voice cheerfully. “And on top of that, you even told me you wouldn’t give me lunch if I lost. And you looked serious, too, Chi.”

“Oh, come on! I’m not listening to you anymore!”

Watching Chiyuri increase her pace while covering both ears, Haruyuki nudged Takumu with his left elbow. “So that’s what all that screaming about the final match was.”

“Well, you know. Ha-ha-ha!”

He laughed with Takumu.

It’s definitely better this way, Haruyuki thought.

His choice two years ago hadn’t been a mistake. After all, the three of them were able to talk like this now, just like they used to. He didn’t want to ruin this relationship.

At that moment, Takumu said lightly, almost like a counterattack: “So Haru, you got to have the Chi special for lunch yesterday, huh?”

“Huh? Oh, that’s, well…” Seeing Chiyuri’s back suddenly stiffen, Haruyuki was slightly panicked. Crap, I still haven’t apologized. What should I do? Should I apologize now? Or maybe e-mail her once I get home—

No, wait.

How did Takumu know that?

Haruyuki’s legs became tangled, and Takumu caught him with a “Whoa!” as he was about to fall. He was unaware even of this as his thoughts raced feverishly.

Chiyuri had made those sandwiches because she knew that Araya and his gang were stealing his lunch money. She definitely wasn’t one for cooking, so he had wondered why…but could it be that she had actually done it on Takumu’s advice?

In which case, that meant that Chiyuri had talked to Takumu. About the fact that Haruyuki was being bullied. If she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have said that just now.

The inside of his head suddenly went incandescent, and unconsciously, Haruyuki pushed away Takumu’s hand on his right elbow.

“H-hey! Haru?” Takumu inquired doubtfully, but Haruyuki couldn’t bring himself to look up at that face.

Letting his gaze roam around, Haruyuki’s eyes met Chiyuri’s, an almost-frozen expression on her face. Her lips moved, and she looked as if she was about to say something. Before she got the chance, though, Haruyuki shouted, “Ah! Sorry, there’s just this show I want to watch! I’m gonna run ahead! See you, Taku!”

He took off running. His legs insisted on getting tangled up, and he nearly fell more than once, but Haruyuki didn’t stop.

The two of them were probably going to talk about him again. About how they could help Haruyuki. Just imagining the conversation, he was overcome with a sensation like the top of his heart was being twisted off. It was too ironic that just when Araya was finally disappearing through a seriously miraculous turn of events, he found out Takumu had already known all about it.

He kept running, legs constantly in motion, until he passed through the entrance to his condo building and dove into an elevator.

The dream Haruyuki had that night was probably at the top of the list of his all-time worst bad dreams.

The bad kids from his elementary school, Araya and subordinates AB, and some outlaw students he didn’t know kept tagging one another out to square off against Haruyuki and knock him around. A slight distance away, Chiyuri and Takumu held hands and watched. More than the pain all over his body, it was their pitying expressions that he had the most trouble enduring.

As the dream progressed, the number of spectators increased. His mother appeared next to the couple (Chiyuri and Takumu), and then even his father—who had left them a long time ago—showed up. The residents of his condo and his classmates joined as well, forming a circle and looking down at Haruyuki as he crawled along the ground.

Now it wasn’t just pity on their faces but scorn. Too many people to count pointed their fingers at ugly, miserable Haruyuki and laughed.

I hate this. I hate it here.

With this thought in mind, he looked up at the remote, dark sky and saw a shadow there. A single bird, wings blacker than the night, spread its wings, soaring lightly.

I want to be up there, too. Higher. Farther.

I want to fly.

To the other side.

“Is that your wish?”