11

An hour later, he was resurrected.

Dying in the Unlimited Neutral Field was an entirely bizarre thing. The scene around you changed to a monotonic black and white; your body became see-through like smoke; and, although you could move, at least in a haphazard way, you couldn’t get any farther than about ten meters from the spot where you died. Tiny digital numbers carved out a countdown in the center of your vision, and when they made it all the way to zero from 60:00:00, the field finally recovered its color and your avatar its substance.

Haruyuki looked down on the fairly decent-size crater he had made and noted out loud, “There is absolutely no doubt that she was Kuroyukihime’s friend.” Then he put both hands on his hips and looked up at the vertical stone wall soaring up before him—the old Tokyo Tower.

“So then by, ‘if I am able see her again,’ she meant…she meant…”

Climb to the top of the tower. That’s what she meant, huh?

After giving his head a quick shake, he sighed heavily. There was that whole bit about pushing the baby birds out of the nest to teach them to fly, but that only ended up a success story if the babies managed to survive the fall.

But unlike birds, Haruyuki’s avatar had two dexterous hands. And his body was as light as possible, and powerful enough to drill into rock.

“Guess I’ll get climbing,” he muttered, as if telling himself to get doing just that, and then clenched his fists.

Even if it were a stone wall that continued straight up for three hundred meters, it wasn’t as though the surface were perfectly slippery-smooth like glass. There were countless gaps where it looked like he could stick his hands and feet, and he should be able to dig out small holes at least.

Steadying his resolve, he crouched slightly and readied his right fist at his hip.

“Hnyaaagh!” With a fierce cry, he shot a straight punch forward.

The blow dug deep into the reddish-brown rock, carving out an indentation about twenty centimeters in diameter. He stuck in his right foot and raised his body up, grabbing hold of a fissure just within the reach of his left hand.

He ran his eyes from side to side and mentally traced out his route. He yanked his avatar up with just his left hand, then set the tip of his left foot firmly on a slight ledge that he had his eye on.

If the truth be told, this wasn’t exactly the first time he was rock climbing like this in a virtual space. In shooting games where you carried a rifle and ran around the jungle or some mountain region, crawling up the side of a cliff like this and catching the enemy team off guard was a great strategy. So to adopt this fighting technique, Haruyuki had even borrowed VR rock-climbing training software from the library.

The secret to free climbing was to first clearly visualize the optimal route. And then not to cling too much to the rock. Haruyuki peered as far ahead as he could see and continued scaling the tower at a steady pace, planning in detail where he would put each of his four limbs.

Almost as if it were competing with him, the red sun in the eastern sky gradually rose above his position. The morning glow disappeared at some point, and the sky became a foreboding yellow.

He already no longer had any idea of how many holds he had grabbed onto. The peak melted into the sky, almost beyond the limits of his vision, and if he had looked down, the ground should have been disappearing from view below him. But he did not look down at his feet once; keeping his face turned to the sky, he simply, wholeheartedly attacked the cliff. He had almost no awareness of himself, and there was no doubt that this concentration when it came to any and all games was essentially the sole and greatest ability of the human being named Haruyuki Arita.

These honed nerves captured a faint, distant vibration transmitting through the air: an omen of the sudden gusts that were a feature of the Wasteland stage. Instantly, Haruyuki thrust both hands into fissures in the rock, pressed his body flat up against the wall surface, and held on tightly.

A few seconds later, the atmosphere roared and shook, and a strong wind, the breath of a giant, assaulted Haruyuki and threatened to shake him loose. But still not feeling much in the way of fear, he calmed himself and waited for the wind to stop. To start with, Silver Crow’s slim, smooth body completely lacking of any protrusions didn’t offer much in the way of air resistance. So he felt sure he wouldn’t be blown away by this much wind, and, in fact, that turned out to be the case.

When the grumpy giant finally gave up, Haruyuki let out a tiny sigh and resumed his ascent.

It was around the time the sun had arrived directly above him and was starting to incline a little to the west. The tip of the rock wall, which had seemed to extend infinitely, finally cut a crisp arc in the sky: the tip of the cylinder, i.e., the peak where Sky Raker was waiting.

It was still more than a hundred meters away. But at this pace, he should be able to reach it before nightfall. And thinking about it now, Sky Raker telling him to make sure to remember the taste of the stew, and her smile when he said that he would definitely wake up the next morning, were probably because she had anticipated him not being able to finish climbing the old Tokyo Tower in a single day.

I’ll reach the peak today and show her! Haruyuki decided to himself, and he tackled the rock face with sure movements, without letting his guard down. The squalls, which had changed direction in the afternoon, assaulted him with increasing frequency, but Haruyuki glued himself to the wall and weathered them all.

The color of the sky gradually deepened, and the ascent that had started with the dawn started to come round on nine hours. As he began to feel an equivalent exhaustion and gritted his teeth determinedly, Haruyuki’s nose captured the faint scent of flowers. And then his ears caught the burbling of the spring, and his eyes made out even the faint blue light of the portal.

A little farther. Twenty—no, fifteen more meters.

If he could climb the whole way on his first try, even Sky Raker would probably be surprised. Haruyuki grew enthusiastic and picked up his pace.

And then.

A high-frequency buzz that he had never felt before shook the air like a howl. A sound, like an infinite number of individual bells rung all at once, came from off in the distance, and Haruyuki lifted his face with a gasp, shooting his gaze over to the horizon in the east. And then he wailed, “Ah! Crap!”

What he saw on that horizon was the shining of an aurora pouring from the sky to slowly caress the earth.

The Change. The super massive phenomenon that transformed the affiliation of the entire Unlimited Neutral Field.

Haruyuki yanked his face back and started scaling the wall at double the speed he had been doing to that point. He slipped sometimes, causing him to break out in a cold sweat, but each time, he narrowly managed to shove his fingers into a gap and grab hold. Without waiting for the pounding of his heart to subside, he leapt once again upward to the next hold.

As if to hurry him along even more, the aurora approached from the east at an incredible speed, the sound of bells growing steadily louder. The reddish-brown Wasteland color of the earth scattered under the embrace of the seven-colored curtain of light, and the land was reborn in a new form. The world was refreshed.

After the Change, any defeated Enemies would be replaced and any stage destruction would be repaired. There were no Enemies in the vicinity of the tower; his problem was the latter issue. If he was caught up in the aurora, the holes that Silver Crow’s sharp hands had carved out of the rock wall would probably—

“Wh-whoa!” Haruyuki shouted, and he tried to climb up the final stretch essentially crawling on all fours. However, he didn’t make the remaining five meters.

The sound of countless bells overwhelmed his ears; the shining of seven hues painted his vision; and in the next instant, Haruyuki’s hands and feet were forcibly flicked off the wall by some repulsive force.

“Dammit! Nooooo!” Flapping in midair, he tried once more to grab hold of the wall, but his efforts were in vain.

“Aaaaaa—”

Haruyuki died again.

When he was resurrected an hour later, the world was blanketed by evening, and it was no longer the red Wasteland.

The surface of the ground was a tight, systematic pattern of paving stones. And the old Tokyo Tower before his eyes had transformed into a steel spire, covered with overlapping metal plates shining blue-black. A Demon City stage.

Haruyuki sighed heavily, clanking as he sat down on the hard stone paving. If this had been a regular game, he would be beating the hell out of his pillow in his own room to distract himself, but he couldn’t log out now, and he didn’t have the energy for that anyway.

But he had managed to make it almost all the way to the top on his first try. Sky Raker had been talking like this training would take several weeks or even longer than that, if it went badly. Taking that into consideration, he should chalk this one up as a job well done. He clenched both fists tightly. Next time, I’ll make it all the way for sure.

He really wanted to set out again right away, but he thought a night climb was probably impossible. He decided to tackle it the second it started to get light in the morning, and after slipping into a suitable building in the area, Haruyuki laid down in one corner of a room that seemed safe.

Maybe it was a reaction to having concentrated so intently for nine hours straight, but he was suddenly overcome by a powerful drowsiness. Haruyuki dropped hard into sleep, without even a second to feel the emptiness of his stomach.

But the morning of the third day since he had dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field, Haruyuki peeled his eyelids all the way back at the sight before him.

The day before, he carelessly hadn’t noticed that the old Tokyo Tower in the Demon City stage was made up of nothing but the same smooth, hard steel plates as Sunshine City when he had fought Chrome Disaster. It had no windows and no stairs. In fact, he couldn’t even find a single indentation where he could hook a finger. Which was to say, there wasn’t anything at all in the way of a handhold for him to climb.

“Then I’ll just have to make some holes,” he muttered, and rapped on the steel material with his fingertips. Just as he had the day before, Haruyuki hit the wall as hard as he could with his clenched fist.

And then jumped up with a cry of pain.

“Ow! Owwwww!”

He cradled his right hand, jumped up and down at the intense pain—amplified to twice that of the lower field—and stared at the place he had just punched, but there wasn’t even a dent in the blue-black wall. An indestructible object— That might not have been the case, but unless you used a heat beam or a drill, you probably weren’t going to have any luck digging a hole in it. And, naturally, Silver Crow was not equipped with such tools.

“So then that means I have to wait for the next Change…?” He gritted his teeth and cursed, but he had absolutely no idea if the next aurora would come several days later, nor if the next tower would be destructible. Haruyuki dropped to his knees in sudden frustration.

Out of the blue, something hit his head with a thunk.

“Wha?!”

He jumped backward, stunned, and saw that his assailant was wrapped in white fabric. He glanced up, but there was just the steel-colored spire stretching infinitely up toward the gray sky; he could see no one.

However, Haruyuki didn’t doubt that this package had been dropped by Sky Raker’s hand. Still dumbfounded, he picked it up and undid the knot to find a large, round bun inside, and a small piece of paper, too.

Instantly, a virtual sensation of hunger assaulted him, and Haruyuki, vexed by the slow pace of the lower half of his helmet sliding up with a whine, bit into the large pastry. It was just a regular bun with nothing inside, but even still, this faintly warm, fragrant thing was absurdly delicious to him, and he devoured it in a trance.

After polishing off half of the bun, he finally flipped the piece of paper over and read the words written there in elegant handwriting.

“The Incarnate training has begun. Think about why you were not sent flying by the wind yesterday.”

“Huh?” He gleaned essentially nothing from this single reading.

Haruyuki had understood the climbing of this wall to be a sort of basic training before the start of the actual Incarnate System training. In kung fu movies and things, you had to intently scrabble up the levels before the old master would teach you the way of the fist, after all.

And the question about why he hadn’t been sent flying by the wind was also cryptic. Obviously, it was because he had held on tight. And Silver Crow’s body had very low air resistance. So if he plastered himself against the wall, the wind just slid over his back—

“Oh!” Haruyuki cried softly, abruptly. He felt like he was getting close to something important. Chewing on the remainder of the bread unconsciously, he continued to ponder the matter further.

Incarnate was a means of manipulating your avatar or objects, using Image Power.

When he had pressed himself up against the rock wall yesterday and endured the wind, Haruyuki had, basically, not even thought about the possibility of being sent flying. With Silver Crow’s slim, smooth body, he had believed he could get through any gust of wind, and that then became fact.

What if that—if the power of the Incarnate System was already at work, then? Had he decreased the pressure he actually received from the air by drawing out a solid image of himself getting through the wind? And if he had, could he do the same thing with this steel wall as his opponent?

Stuffing the last bit of bread into his mouth, he slid his helmet back down with a whoosh and stared intently at his right hand. The five fingers there could not be any slimmer or sharper. And the silver armor shone, quite hard-looking.

Not a punch—a spear hand strike.

The thought hit him spontaneously, and he lined his fingers up tightly against one another, stretched out straight. Fixing his wrist, his arm from the elbow down looked almost like a sword. He dropped his hips, extended one leg behind him, and this time glared at the wall in front of him.

The steel plates glittering blue-black did look formidable, but it was, after all, the stage background. It simply existed, without any meaning whatsoever. Put another way, the thing itself was nothing more than an enumeration of the code in the Brain Burst server somewhere.

If he couldn’t dig a hole in a thing like that, how could he call himself a duelist? Without a doubt, if it were she, if it were the Black King, Black Lotus, without batting an eyelash, she would shred this wall like it was butter.

He positioned his arm, fingers aligned, at his hip. He took a deep breath and then another—

“Hah!!” He thrust straight ahead with a martial arts–style cry.

Pale sparks shot in all directions, accompanied by a sharp squeal. A pain so intense it made him dizzy ran up the joints of each finger, his wrist, and then his elbow. The HP gauge in the top left of his view was shaved down the tiniest bit.

Moaning involuntarily, Haruyuki dropped heavily to his knees, but when he looked up, it was definitely there. A sharp scar about a centimeter long and a millimeter deep, etched out of the smooth wall.

I can do it! he thought, immediately followed by him lamenting, It’s not enough!

His image power wasn’t strong enough yet. He got hurt because he was thinking of his fingers as fingers, his arm as an arm. Think sword. A sword that could pierce and mince anything, like hers.

He stood and snapped his fingers out again. After thinking for a minute, he bent his thumb toward the palm of his hand. Thus, his arm, from elbow to middle finger’s tip, made a sharp line, almost as if it had been designed that way right from the start.

This time, rather than positioning it at his hip, he brought it a little higher, readying it near his shoulder, drawn back as far as he could. Then, he thrust his left hand far out in front, twisting it ninety degrees as he did so. He had seen Black Lotus move like that for her special attack, “Death by Piercing.”

“Hiyaah!”

The crash of impact this time was a little higher and clearer than the last time. And although he was made to dance again with a pain like lightning and forced to grit his teeth, the scar gouged out of the wall was a tiny bit deeper.

That day eventually ended with him simply continuing to attack the wall.

He gradually stopped feeling the pain, and although he was able to dig his fingertips in about three millimeters when the sun was near setting, he was still nowhere near the level of being able to use that as a support to climb the wall. However, rather than trying to push himself, Haruyuki returned to the same roost as the day before, even feeling a kind of satisfaction in his profound exhaustion.

Was there a chance that his work was just ordinary escapism?

He couldn’t avoid the thought as he laid down. Because it was a fact that by accelerating, he was stretching out time and putting off the problem of Chiyuri, Takumu, and Nomi. But right now, he was happy at being able to concentrate so intently and throw himself into something like this; the work was a blessing to him. Haruyuki closed his eyes and once again slept like the dead.

The morning of the fourth day.

He stood in the same place as the previous day and revised his thinking as he stared at the many scars cut into the wall of blue-lit steel.

The directionality of his Imaging thought process should be correct: imagine hardness and sharpness in his fingers and the power in his arms hammering out those holes. But he felt like one thing wasn’t quite right somehow.

As he was hemming and hawing, a fabric package made a direct hit to his head once again. He quickly grabbed it from the ground and yelled thanks up at the sky before biting into the bread inside.

Again today, a single note was attached. Heart pounding, he opened it.

“Good luck, Corvus! ♥” was all it said, and Haruyuki snorted lightly, flustered by the symbol at the end of the sentence. He had been expecting a hint like yesterday, but nothing else was written there.

So then I guess this means I already know all the things I need to know, he thought, making short work of the bread before starting to desperately rack his brains once more.

Will. Desire straight from the heart. Image Power. Sky Raker’s words came back to life in his ears. Do you see? Image Power! It is precisely this that is the true power hidden within us Burst Linkers.

Hold…on. Her speech sounded really familiar, something from a long time ago, way back, something She had said as well. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Her voice played vividly from the depths of his memory.

Listen, Haruyuki. You’re fast. You can become faster than anyone else. Faster even than me, faster than the other kings. And speed is a Burst Linker’s greatest strength.

There was no way he could forget that. Those were the words she said to him right before she used the final command of Physical Full Burst to save him. Kuroyukihime had to have known about the Incarnate System hidden within Burst Linkers at that time. However, she had expressed the greatest power not as “image power” but as “speed.” Which meant—

The two were the same thing.

The word speed that Kuroyukihime had used wasn’t simply referring to the pace of a duel avatar’s movement in the field. The signal speed output by the brain and the consciousness connected to the Neurolinker. The quickness of the response between this world and yourself. And that, namely, was being closer to the true nature of the world.

“Manipulation…through images…,” Haruyuki murmured and readied his right hand.

It wasn’t about power. It was about speed. What he should be imagining was that. Moving as fast as he possibly could. Getting as close to the world as he possibly could. Becoming one with it.

“…Foo!” With the faintest of cries, Haruyuki put the image of light on his right hand and sent it flying.

Although faint, a white light did trace out its trajectory through space. Schwing! The sound echoed beautifully, almost like something from a musical instrument.

Haruyuki looked at his own fingers, buried more than five millimeters in the steel wall, and clenched his left fist tightly.

For another three days, Haruyuki continued the same training in the same spot.

He rose with the sun and greedily devoured the bun tossed down from the peak. The heart symbol was sometimes there, sometimes not, on the accompanying note, but with the piece of paper’s encouraging words as support, he turned to face the wall and focused on delivering spear-hand strikes over and over with both hands.

In the fourteen or so years of Haruyuki’s life, he had never once concentrated on a single thing for so long a time. Or perhaps it would be better to say that this was a time that, right from the start, could not exist in the real world. A flesh-and-blood body frequently got hungry, quickly got tired, and he did have to go to school, after all. It was precisely because of the Unlimited Neutral Field, where the flow of time was accelerated a thousand times, and his duel avatar, which did not know exhaustion, that this intense focus was possible.

It didn’t at all seem like the light emitted by his fingertips, the depth they dug into the wall, and all the things he could experience around him were increasing. But Haruyuki harbored no doubts about his straightforward training. And so, aware of nothing but the speed of the signal emitted by his brain and delivered to his avatar, he repeated the same action thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times.

He felt like this training might be something that would one day suddenly awaken his “true power.” He understood he was setting his sights on something that could only be reached through the steady accumulation of something that was invisible to him. It was the same as with the virtual squash game where he had tried endlessly for the high score in the Umesato Junior High’s local net. Concentration and accumulation. There was no short cut.

Sky Raker, waiting at the peak of this iron tower—along with the Red King Nico and the Black King Kuroyukihime, who stood at the peak of the accelerated world itself—also probably had gone down this road in the past. Although he was so far behind them on this long, long road, he couldn’t even see their shadows.

Someday, I’ll be there, too…I will definitely reach that place someday. Such did Haruyuki pray intently from his heart at sunset on the sixth day as he gazed at his right hand, which was finally able to dig into the thick steel up to the base of his fingers.

It took another half day until he was able to do the same thing while attached to the wall—near noon on the day that marked a week since he’d come to this world.

After staring attentively at the sun, which shone weakly on the other side of thick black clouds, and deliberating for a while, Haruyuki decided to at last start his second ascent. There were only another five or six hours until sunset, but he wouldn’t need to look for rocks jutting out, pause in his route, or double back on himself like in the Wasteland stage. If he climbed straight up, he could make it to the top before nightfall.

“All right!” Haruyuki slammed his hands against the sides of his helmet, let out a battle cry, and inflicted the first strike on the wall.

With a clear ringing, the white light traced out its trajectory, and his swordlike hand pierced deep into the wall. Hand reliably jammed in as a support, he yanked his body up and then struck in a slightly higher place with his left hand.

Speed. The speed of light. That’s all you think about.

At some point, Haruyuki even stopped repeating the word speed to himself. All that existed in his brain was the image of a sword tip, of a white light being thrust forward.

Pierce. Lift body. Concentrate. Pierce again.

Since he needed to plunge his fingers in as level as he possibly could, the distance he gained with one cycle was just barely thirty centimeters. When he thought about the fact that he was trying to climb 333 meters, a simple calculation told him he would have to pierce the wall 1,010 times.

But Haruyuki absorbedly, intently repeated the same action. Without looking at the peak or the ground, he forgot the past and the future; the wall in front of him and his own fingertips became his entire world.

Pierce. Pierce. Again. Again.

Already, his striking hand was emitting a dazzling, laser-like light. The depth to which his sword hand dug rapidly increased, to the point where it was work to pull it out again, but he was unaware of that as well and simply continued to pierce and climb.

Haruyuki sank into a deep, abnormal concentration, even greater than when he was tackling the bullet-evasion game he had created. The information from his sight and hearing lost its meaning, and the steel wall eventually disappeared as well. In the seemingly endless darkness, there were only the flashes emitted by his hands, alternating flickers—

No.

He could see something.

Far, far in the distance in the darkness was a blue rippling like the surface of water.

The portal? Someone was on the other side of it. Vision filled with a golden radiance, all he could see was the silhouette, but he was sure…someone was…

Haruyuki broke through the dense darkness with both hands and tried to go to the silhouette. He felt like it was calling him.

“Who…are you…?” His voice rang out in the gloom and echoed loudly, and to this, some kind of response, no, something like a signal—

Then a faint trembling raced along his body, and Haruyuki opened his eyes wide with a gasp.

Before his eyes was the blue-black steel wall, unchanged. The sky was already dyed a deep red. Sunset was near.

But a light that was not the sun reached him from the east, and Haruyuki stared at it. A seven-colored aurora surging from the sky. The sound of bells. It was the Change.

Except that this time, Haruyuki couldn’t hurry.

He continued to move both hands at the same fixed pace as he had been. Even without looking up, he could feel the edge of the peak close above him. As if aiming to make Haruyuki fall, the aurora advanced aggressively. The snapping and roaring of the land being rebuilt filled the world.

Pierce. Lift body. Pierce. Lift body.

Simultaneous with his next strike, his vision was assaulted by the seven-colored beam, and Silver Crow’s slender body was instantly sent flying into the sky, flicked by the finger of an unseen giant.

The summit of the tower, so tantalizingly within reach, grew distant as the virtual gravity reached out its hand for Haruyuki, practically salivating.

But.

“…Hng!” With a low cry from the sky, Haruyuki set his sights on the wall two meters above him and launched his final blow.

Schwaaan! The simple sound reverberated through the air, and a sword of pure white light reached out and pierced deep—deep into a wall it should not have been able to reach.

At the same time as he felt sure resistance, Haruyuki used his arm as a fulcrum to vault himself upward with all his might. Whirling around and around, he flew through the aurora, and where he landed with a crunch was—

The lawn of the garden in the sky, which he hadn’t set foot on in a week.

“Welcome back, Corvus.”

Still crouching on one knee, Haruyuki heard the gentle voice from above. An intense despair washed over him at that, but he fought back against it and earnestly raised his head.

The sky-blue avatar in the silver wheelchair was looking down on him with a smile. “You came back very quickly, just as I had expected. No wonder you are the ‘child’ she selected.”

Haruyuki responded from a totally different place. “I shouldn’t have made it.” Because in his head, only the sensation of his final strike burned too brightly. “With my short arms, that was a distance that I completely could not reach…But I believed—No, I knew that I would. That…If that’s the power of the will, then…”

Here, he finally focused both eyes on Sky Raker and continued. “That’s not ‘playing’ in any sense of the word. It’s something…deeper…connected to this world. It’s a…It’s…” Haruyuki fumbled fervently through the limited number of endings for that sentence and managed to somehow put into words what he wanted to say. “It’s like a rewriting of the facts…”

“Yes. That’s exactly it.”

Sky Raker’s smile disappeared as she clasped her hands together tightly. When she continued, her voice was weightier. “Overwrite. This one word is precisely the key to the Incarnate System. However, you can’t comprehend if you simply hear the word. You have to experience it.”

“Over…write,” Haruyuki repeated hoarsely and Sky Raker assented softly.

“The Incarnate System—in other words, the control system built into the Brain Burst program—is essentially assistive at best. It’s nothing more than a system to support movement control and supplement the avatar’s motion. But images released too quickly and too strongly by the consciousness can surpass even the constraints of the program and become manifest. Wheels that shouldn’t turn turn, an arm that shouldn’t reach reaches. A resolute intention, a will overwrites events.”

Haruyuki had supposedly reached the first level in the Incarnate System, but these words invoked a sense of wonder in him.

It had already been six months since he started playing Brain Burst. It was supposed to be nothing more than a game. But of all the countless titles he had played up to that point, he wondered if there was even one that questioned the strength of image power—that is, of the will.

The wheelchair advanced with a creak and stopped directly in front of Haruyuki, who was still squatting there, struck by these feelings. He timidly accepted the proffered hand and was pulled up with an unexpected strength; somehow, he managed to stand, albeit with a wobble.

Sky Raker took her hand back and smiled once more before uttering even more unexpected words.

“And now I have nothing else to teach you.”

“Huh?” Haruyuki gasped and shook his head side to side several times. “B-but I’m still…I mean, I just finally climbed the wall! That’s a long way from flying. I still have so many things to learn—”

“I told you, Corvus,” the sky-blue avatar said calmly, shaking her head slowly, “that I never reached the sky in the end. Perhaps you are the one who will be able to fly one day with Incarnate alone. But that will probably take a very long time. Even if you focus hard on forging yourself in this world…Yes, probably ten years.”

“Te—” Haruyuki was at a loss for words and clenched his teeth together tightly before saying, “I-I don’t care. If it means I’ll be able to fly again, I’ll—”

“You mustn’t.” Instantly, a severe voice cut him off. “Six months, a year, you can still go back. But those who spend ten years in this world can no longer return to reality.”

“Huh?”

“They no longer care about anything happening in the real world. They quit school, forget their friends, and lock themselves up in their rooms, thinking that everything is fine as long as they have this world. More than a few such Burst Linkers roam the Unlimited Neutral Field. No longer dueling or training, they hide themselves here for the sole purpose of running away from the real world…Silver Crow. Why do you play this game Brain Burst?”

Although Haruyuki was slightly confused at the sudden question, he answered right away, absorbed. “T-to become stronger. To get stronger, reach level ten with her, and…beat this game. To know what lays ahead, I…”

“In that case, you mustn’t stay here. If you don’t go back, you will finally begin to fear the end of the world. You’ll end up praying for nothing other than eternity for the accelerated world. If you don’t want to lose this feeling now, go back to reality.”

“B-but, I-I—” Shaking his head fiercely, Haruyuki shouted, “I want to fly! No! I…have to fly one more time.”

Two arms reached out to support Haruyuki as he dropped to his knees on the lawn with a thump. Held tightly against Sky Raker’s chest, his entire body frozen solid in surprise, he heard a still voice murmur very close to his right ear, “It’s okay. I’ll give you my wings.”

“Huh?”

“My Enhanced Armament, Gale Thruster. You should be able to master it now. I know you’ll be able to flap those wings up to the heights I couldn’t reach.”

Haruyuki, very close to fainting at the sensation of touching a certain un-avatar-like well-roundedness under the white dress, somehow pulled himself back together and asked in a trembling voice, “Wh-why? Why would you do all this for me? I-I know it’s kind of late to be asking, but…you’re Ash Roller’s parent, and he and I are—”

“Friends. Aren’t you?”

He held his breath again at her swift response.

“Every time he has a duel with you, he never fails to tell me quite excitedly all about how he won or lost. Having an opponent like that is a delightful thing. Even if, for instance, you serve different Masters. Which is why for his sake as well, I want you to fly again.”

After a long, long silence, Haruyuki earnestly squeezed out, “Thank you. So much.”

At the same time, albeit very belatedly, he thought about his attitude the last time he and Ash Roller dueled, and how it had made the man despair somehow—it had even hurt him. Very much unable to put into words the myriad emotions swirling around in his heart, Haruyuki simply repeated the same word over and over.

“Definitely…definitely, definitely.”

“Yes. Definitely. You are one who will be able to make it over the wall. Now then. It is time for you to depart from this garden, Corvus. The next time we meet will be in the real world.”

“Wh-what?!” When he lifted his face at the unexpected declaration, red eyes were smiling gently at him—from extremely close up.

“Naturally. For the transfer of Enhanced Armament, you must either go through the Shop or direct in the real. If I sold it, it would have quite the hefty price tag, one that you most certainly would not be able to pay with the Burst points you have.”

“S-something that valuable—”

“It’s fine. I know he wants you to fly again as well. Now, for the time and place, let’s see…Seven in the morning real time, in front of the west exit of Shinjuku Station, there’s a…”

Haruyuki knew the burger shop Sky Raker specified, so he bobbed his head up and down, stunned at the speed things were moving.

“Good. Well then— Hmm?” Releasing the arms embracing him and moving to pull herself away from Haruyuki, Sky Raker cocked her head slightly. Her fingertips repeatedly traced the center of the now wingless Silver Crow’s back.

“Uh, um…is something…?” Enduring the ticklish feeling, Haruyuki craned his neck.

“No…it’s nothing. Now, you should be on your way.” Sky Raker made Haruyuki stand and then she nodded, grinning in her wheelchair.

Not knowing how to express his feelings of gratitude, Haruyuki bowed as deeply as he possibly could and said in a shaking voice, “Thank you so much, Sky Raker. Um…the stew and the buns were delicious.”

Then he whirled around before she could notice the tears streaming down his face below his helmet. Etching the night scene of the newly transformed Unlimited Neutral Field deep into his memory, he leapt straight into the shimmering blue portal at its center.

Having awoken on his own bed in the real world, Haruyuki just lay on his sheets for a while.

When he finally glanced at the clock, it was only 9:10 PM. Yet he had the definite feeling of having been away from his house for a terrifyingly long time. The taste of the pizza he had supposedly eaten immediately prior to diving was completely erased from his memory.

Just ten minutes— Passing just a week on the other side, he felt a separation from his present. How would it be if it had been six months, a year? He pursed his lips firmly, and his right cheek suddenly ached.

The reason for this pain alone was something he wouldn’t be able to forget: Takumu hitting him after he had said those terrible things.

“I have to apologize,” he muttered, caressing his cheek with his fingertips. To get his incomparable partner back, he had to reclaim what had been stolen from him, no matter what. His pride—and his wings.

Taking off his Neurolinker, Haruyuki set the alarm clock on the shelf and closed his eyes. Instantly, he was overcome by the exhaustion of climbing a tower in another world, and he tumbled into the deep abyss of sleep.