1

“Why…?”

Haruyuki had no choice but to listen to the cracked, broken voice that spilled from his throat. “Why would you…Chiyu…?”

The chill wind of the Purgatory stage ripped away his hollow question and blew it toward the yellow sky, but no reply came. Standing motionless on the school roof, the avatar the color of new leaves—Lime Bell/Chiyuri Kurashima—lowered her face to avoid Haruyuki’s eyes. She slumped to the concrete beneath her with a soft clack, still clutching the iron railing with her right hand.

But instead of Chiyuri’s voice, a deep, twisted laugh echoed a response.

“Feh…heh-heh…!”

Flat on his back nearby, arms and legs splayed, the dusk-colored avatar shook his lens-shaped mask back and forth. “Ehheh…heh. This…This is incredible…This is restoration…Truly a miraculous power! Heh-heh, ha-ha-ha!”

The avatar continued to laugh quietly, and his body—newly restored to perfect health—glittered a glossy blackish purple as if the incredible injuries he had sustained mere minutes ago had never happened. The healing didn’t stop at his body; even the destroyed flamethrower of his right arm had been restored to mint condition.

After a fierce struggle on the field of Umesato Junior High, Haruyuki/Silver Crow and Takumu/Cyan Pile had crushed the twilight avatar Dusk Taker. Haruyuki had ripped his arms off in an air battle, and Takumu had impaled him with his special attack when Nomi/Dusk Taker crashed to the ground. Together, they had beaten him down to the point where a single hit with a normal attack would wipe out what little remained of his HP gauge. Now they simply stood frozen in place behind him.

Because Lime Bell had appeared out of nowhere to interrupt them from the roof. Her left arm sent a shower of light raining down on Dusk Taker, bringing his HP back up to full in an instant. Even his right arm was back in its socket, good as new.

“Why…Why, Chi?!” Haruyuki screamed as if to split his throat in two, turning his eyes back up toward the school.

Dusk Taker was the enemy. And Seiji Nomi, the new seventh grader behind the avatar, didn’t appear on the matching list, despite the fact that he was in possession of Brain Burst. Instead, he made profligate use of his acceleration ability in kendo matches and on tests. He had even gone so far as to set a trap for Haruyuki, backing him into a terrible corner where he was on the verge of being expelled from school. And then, using his special attack Demonic Commandeer, he had stolen Silver Crow’s wings in a duel.

Spirit shattered by this loss, Haruyuki had somehow managed to yank himself to his feet again and undergo an agonizing struggle to gain a new power to replace his wings. Broken and battered though he was from all this, victory had been within reach only moments earlier. So why, after all that, did Chiyuri have to interfere?

Plunged into a hell of confusion, Haruyuki could do nothing more than open his eyes wide beneath his silver mask and stare intently at Lime Bell.

Chiyuri didn’t even open her mouth. She simply tightened her grip on the railing and kept her face hidden beneath the brim of her large hat. He could see her slender shoulders trembling—like she was fighting some impulse inside herself.

Why? It’s obvious. The sudden insight struck Haruyuki, a bolt of lightning. Nomi. Seiji Nomi probably talked to her during lunch today and demanded that she obey him. Nomi had found her weak point, just like he had with Haruyuki, and was threatening her with something. That was the only possible explanation.

Yanking his gaze back to the field, Haruyuki watched Dusk Taker, still lying on his back laughing raspily, spread the black wings on his back. Cut from the cloth of darkness itself, the wings beat the air, and the slim avatar slowly began to stand, drawn up by invisible threads.

“Feh-heh-heh…Hmn, hn-hn-hn-hm…” The smug, throaty chuckling rapidly grew louder. Reddish-purple orbs flickered brightly beneath the illuminated compound eye of his visor. “Hm-hm, ha-ha-ha-ha! First flying. Now healing. Two very rare powers. And now both of them are mine.”

After floating to his feet, the avatar drifted up another thirty centimeters and came to a halt. Throwing his regenerated arms out to his sides, Dusk Taker turned claw-shaped fingers skyward. An inky, dark aura gushed from his hands like a viscous liquid. “Aah…I feel so good! The delight of plunder! Taking someone’s dreams, their hopes, their possibilities, and trampling them! This feeling of omniscience, I simply can’t get enough of it!!”

The ugly joy in a young boy’s voice became a physical pressure and radiated through the field, causing Haruyuki’s injury-riddled avatar to reel. Paying no mind to this, however, Haruyuki forced himself to speak, his voice stained with a myriad of emotions. “You.” He took a step toward the blackish-purple avatar floating high above him. “Nomi. What did you do? What did you do to Chiyu?!”

Dusk Taker languidly turned his head to gaze down at Haruyuki. Thin eyes within the half-closed spherical visor blinked with exaggerated slowness. A poisonous, deeply scornful smile grew wordlessly until it filled his face.

Haruyuki’s field of view was suddenly dyed bloodred. All the confused emotion in his heart had snapped into laser focus upon a single point: an overwhelming loathing of all that was Seiji Nomi.

“No…miii…,” Haruyuki growled, unconsciously arranging the remaining fingers of his right hand into the shape of a sword. Veeeeen! The squeal of resonance rang in his ears; a silver light flickered at his fingertips.

But the light wouldn’t stabilize, as though the swirling hatred in his heart were static that prevented him from creating the image of his silver sword. Regardless, Haruyuki brandished his right arm and moved to slash Dusk Taker out of the sky.

“Unh…Aaaaaaah!!” A blue shadow streaked past Haruyuki’s right side, together with a cry like vomiting blood.

Cyan Pile. The heavyweight avatar plunged forward, armor scorched and still smoking from the earlier fight, and the earth shook in his wake. “You…made Chi cryyyyyy!!”

Takumu never lost his cool, no matter what the situation. He was generally the one who kept Haruyuki’s own violence in check, and yet here he was now, hurtling recklessly toward Nomi, screaming like a child.

Even with the equivalent of a tank charging at him, Dusk Taker didn’t flinch. He casually raised a slender hand and spread the sharply pointed fingers. “Be gone,” he spat.

Zzraa! At the strange vibration noise, his right hand was cloaked in a pulsing, glittering purple emptiness. The pulsation quickly changed shape to become claws—sickles slithering out from the tips of his fingers. Five of these long, curving claws lazily wrapped themselves around Cyan Pile’s charging bulk and made contact in five places—both sides of the neck, the right flank, left shoulder, and the left flank—and then slid smoothly together. It was a fist clenching, as if Cyan Pile were nothing more than butter.

Haruyuki groaned silently as the blue, heavyweight avatar’s torso was sliced into pieces. Head and arms flew off into space, terrifying cascades of sparks bursting from the stumps. They grazed past Dusk Taker and dropped heavily to the ground behind him, inert. Eventually, Takumu’s still-sprinting lower half collapsed with a thud.

After a small lag—a lag that seemed to say, The severing came before the system could even confirm the damage—Cyan Pile’s HP gauge slid into a precipitous drop. Halved, the bar turned yellow; at 20 percent remaining, red; and still it plummeted—

—to zero.

The remains of the divided avatar exploded into pale polygon fragments and scattered. Before Haruyuki’s eyes, a system message popped up to the effect that Dusk Taker had destroyed Cyan Pile.

“…Keh…Keh-heh, hah-ha!” The voice that dripped from the twilight avatar sneered. “Losers…Why do you suppose they’re just so funny? I mean, they don’t even attempt to recognize defeat. They simply flounder as he did in such an unsightly fashion until, in the end, even their pride is taken from them. I really thought Mayuzumi was more intelligent. Quite disillusioning. Well, I suppose he was the muscle-bound, macho avatar, after all, right up to his brain. Hmn-hm-hm, heh-heh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

Dusk Taker laughed loudly, a pronounced dark aura radiating from both arms.

Bathed in this sneering condescension, Haruyuki stared for a few seconds at the spot where Takumu had disappeared, and then looked up at Chiyuri, still crouched down on the school roof. As Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot, the silver light in his right hand flickered and disappeared.

It wasn’t that he had lost the will to fight. Just the opposite, in fact. A ferocious destructive impulse ripped through his avatar like a raging fire, shaking Haruyuki to his bones.

I hate him. I want to break him. I want to beat the crap out of this duel avatar Dusk Taker—no, the consciousness of Seiji Nomi living inside the avatar. I want to slice it up, rip it to pieces, and dance on the remains.

This world was not a virtual game field anymore, the battle no longer an exchange of damage points. Until that moment, Haruyuki had never felt actual hatred toward an enemy who crushed him in any game, including Brain Burst, much less hatred toward the actual flesh-and-blood player controlling that enemy. But right now was different. The black loathing coursing through his veins burned far more hotly than the flame of regret.

THEN DESTROY HIM, someone whispered out of the blue, right behind him. DESTROY HIM, EAT HIM. DEVOUR HIS FLESH, DRINK HIM DRY OF BLOOD, TAKE EVERYTHING.

The voice was familiar. Haruyuki had definitely heard this twisted, low sound and its metallic overtones at some point, somewhere. However, before his brain could arrive at the memory of where exactly, he felt an intense cold, like being pierced with a needle of ice, in the middle of his back. Drilling deep between his shoulder blades, the ice penetrated to his heart before dissipating into a liquid-metal chill throughout his body.

A bone-chillingly cold hunger merged with his molten hatred, and his field of vision narrowed sharply. The metallic green ground of the Purgatory stage, the organic structure of the school, Lime Bell’s head hanging on its roof—all disappeared beyond a swaying curtain of darkness. He could see nothing but Dusk Taker, still chuckling with his high-pitched scorn.

“Noo…mii.”

A groan colored by the same metallic effect as the voice he had just heard crawled out from his throat.

“Nomi…You…bastaaard…”

Haruyuki dumped—forced—his raging emotions into the tip of his remaining hand.

Activating the Incarnate System—a technique allowing players to interfere with Brain Burst’s Image Control System to bring about a reality outside of the game’s framework—required a very deep mental focus. Appropriately, the “light sword” Haruyuki manifested with his will had disappeared the instant this loathing of Nomi had flooded him.

Nevertheless.

Zrrk! A long sword stretched from Silver Crow’s right hand abruptly. But not in its former snow-white state: The blade in his hand was jet-black. It absorbed and thereby erased all light, a hungry darkness deeper than the midnight purple of the claws Nomi had materialized.

“Hmm?” Dusk Taker stopped laughing as he noticed the unusual change in Silver Crow. “Oh my. You’re not still thinking of trying something, are you, Arita? Perhaps you plan to join in with your partner in solidarity and expose me to the same shameful sight?”

Haruyuki didn’t have the mental leeway to respond to this sneering. His own thoughts were entirely swallowed up by the sword that was in his right hand. All that existed now was the singular urge to slice up and destroy the enemy before him.

YES. EAT HIM. EAT HIM. DEVOUR HIM, the brutal voice inside his head whispered.

Urged on, he staggered ahead, planting his forward foot.

Immediately after, he kicked off the ground like a rocket.

“Unh…Aaaaaaah!!” Roaring, he brandished the dark sword high, high above his head. Putting everything—attack speed, his avatar’s weight, his raging hatred—on the tip of this sword, Haruyuki slashed downward at the face mask of the floating Dusk Taker.

Kendo player that he was, Nomi should have had no trouble avoiding his completely obvious, head-on slash attack. But the purple avatar didn’t even attempt to dodge. Instead, he simply opened his right hand and waited for the black blade, ready to grab it just as he had Cyan Pile.

The sword materialized by Haruyuki and the five sickles made incarnate by Nomi clashed in midair.

When they fought earlier, their Incarnate attacks had bounced back violently, fighting each other the instant they touched. This time, however, the exact opposite occurred: The moment the inky blade and the blackish-purple sickles collided, a darkness began swirling from center point, threatening to devour both weapons.

“Hngh.” Dusk Taker let out a low groan. “An attack with the same attribute…?! How can this…?” He narrowed his eyes, as if observing the phenomenon intently.

In contrast, Haruyuki’s mind was blank as he poured every ounce of his strength into keeping his blade from being knocked aside.

“Unh…Hng, graah!” Grinding his teeth below his mask, he roared, “You be gone, Nomi…Disappear! Get out of my…siiiiiiight!!”

Vwaan!! The sword of his right hand shuddered, and the vortex of darkness at the point of contact grew more and more viscous. Nomi’s long sickles crumbled at the tips, the gloom starting to swallow them.

“Tch!” Clicking his tongue, Nomi spawned oversize purple talons on his left hand as well and placed them over the sickles already clutching Haruyuki’s sword. The darkness, a small black hole, twisted even more fiercely, sucking metal insects and fragments of objects up from the ground, which momentarily flashed before disappearing entirely.

“Such insolence!!” Dusk Taker cried, and the pulsing purple emptiness jetting from both hands grew.

“Hngaaaah!!” A beast-like roar surged from Haruyuki’s throat.

Perhaps due to an abnormal gravity calculation where they stood, even the thick, hanging clouds began to spin slowly, drawn down toward the earth in a funnel. The school windows shattered one after another, a sharp light effect blew through the air, and concentric fissures rippled the ground with lightning-like sparks.

And then several things happened all at once.

“Stop! Stop already!!” Chiyuri’s tearful scream echoed throughout the stage.

“Go awaaaaaaay!!” Haruyuki’s thundering roar drowned her out.

The remaining time displayed in the upper part of his vision hit zero.

TIME UP!! The text blazed to life before his eyes, announcing the end of the duel.

After the Battle Royale mode results screen, when the acceleration was released and Haruyuki slipped through rings of radiated light to return to the real, he couldn’t remember right away what he had been doing before the duel had started—or, for that matter, when or where he had been.

Stretching out before his eyes was the rubberized, reddish-brown track. Several boys in jerseys were running ahead of him.

And then Haruyuki himself was hitting the ground noisily with his own feet. His consciousness was unable to merge completely with the movements of his body; he was frustratingly sluggish, and he nearly tripped and fell. But he pinwheeled his arms madly and somehow managed to catch himself. The students sitting inside the track and the boy running alongside him burst out laughing.

Right. I was in the middle of the three-thousand-meter run. It’s Tuesday, fifth period. The middle of gym class, he thought, dumbfounded, before suddenly becoming aware of a magma-like emotion erupting from the depths of his stomach. What the hell am I doing? Gym class? Long-distance run? Who cares about all that?! Seiji Nomi…I have to destroy him! Whatever it takes!!

“Unnh!” He couldn’t completely suppress the low moan. He gritted his teeth, glared at the distant finish line, and poured all this newfound fury into his limbs. The plodding sound of his feet, scraping heavily on the track, increased in pitch. His body leaned forward.

A red letter R blinked next to the time clock displayed in the lower part of his vision, to let him know that he was breaking his personal record. Unaware of even this, however, Haruyuki put everything he had into sprinting the remaining ninety meters. He didn’t actually overtake the students ahead of him in this last spurt, but he was clearly closing the gap, which caused a bit of a commotion among the boys in the class.

But Haruyuki was indifferent to their chatter, and to his new time flashing before his eyes, the instant he crossed the finish line. Without stopping for even a second, he just kept running in a straight line toward the doors.

“Heeey! Where’re you going, Aritaaa? Bathroooom?” He heard his gym teacher’s laid-back voice and the laughter of the other students, but he ignored them both.

He was obviously not headed for the bathroom. He was going to climb up to the third floor of the school and raid Nomi Seiji’s classroom. He was going to pin Nomi’s flesh-and-blood body to the ground, force him to direct, and make him unilaterally and unconditionally surrender, this time for sure. And if he couldn’t do that, he was going to rip Nomi’s Neurolinker off his neck, smash it into tiny pieces, and destroy the core chip.

This kind of barbarity was absolutely necessary, wasn’t it? After all, this was the boy who had stooped to the most cowardly of blows: threatening Chiyuri to make her do his bidding.

Each time the intensely violent urge welled up within him, a point in the middle of his back throbbed. Almost like the urge was being created there, over and over again, endlessly.

“You just wait!” he spat, and pushed off the ground even more violently—until a powerful hand from behind clamped tightly down on his left shoulder.

“You have to stop, Haru!”

Haruyuki heard a stifled voice in his ear and reflexively put on the brakes. Unable to stop in anything remotely resembling the cool manner of his duel avatar, he pitched forward and was about to fall when arms grabbed on to him and yanked him back up.

“Taku, why are you trying to stop me?!” he squeezed out hoarsely, head hanging very low.

“If you get suspended for fighting now, the only thing that’ll happen is Chi’s life will get a whole lot worse!” Takumu Mayuzumi replied, holding Haruyuki’s left arm with his own muscular right.

“Her life’s bad enough as it is! Nomi—he threatened Chiyu and forced her to do what he told her! You just gonna let him get away with that?!” Haruyuki whirled around to look at Takumu and saw that the normally clear gaze in his eyes was twisted in agony behind his sport glasses. Haruyuki swallowed his breath.

Right. It wasn’t like Takumu had no feelings. In his heart, he had to be even more worried about Chiyuri than Haruyuki was, and burning with rage at Nomi’s tricks besides. But at the same time, his old friend was also worried about him—despite the fact that Haruyuki himself had been simply spurred on by anger, without giving the slightest thought to Takumu.

His back throbbed again, but this was the last time, and the violent impulse receded like a storm. After inhaling deeply and exhaling through his trembling throat, Haruyuki relaxed his shoulders and sighed. “But, I mean, you, you went flying at Nomi before I did.”

Takumu let out a short, bitter laugh. “Seriously. How many years has it been since I lost it like that…”

Haruyuki felt the ill will that had hung between them melt away—the one that had been there since they’d argued at his house the day Nomi stole his wings. They stood in the corner of the schoolyard in the silence that followed for a while, but finally, with everyone apparently having finished their runs on the track behind them, the teacher clapped his hands to call the students all together.

“Shall we go back, Haru?”

Haruyuki nodded slowly at the words and added in a quiet voice, “You tell Chiyu. Tell her no matter what Nomi said to her, she definitely does not have to obey him.”

“Yeah, I got it. I’ll— No, we’ll protect Chi.”

They met each other’s eyes for a moment and then turned on their heels.

Haruyuki glared up at the third floor of the school one final time and then murmured in the depths of his heart, Nomi, you did something that should never, ever be done. From this moment on, the fight with you is a death match, no time limit. If it kills me, I will destroy whatever you are using to block accelerated duels. I will devote my life to hunting and fighting you until one of us has no more burst points.

Grinding his teeth, Haruyuki began to walk back to his class alongside Takumu.

But a mere ten minutes later, everything skidded off the rails in a totally unexpected direction.

Fifth period was barely over before Haruyuki and Takumu were dashing over to the gym on the other side of the main school building. They spotted Chiyuri just as she was coming out of the hallway between the two buildings and beckoned her urgently from the shadow of a pillar.

Still in her T-shirt and shorts, she froze when she saw them. Which was only natural. Only a few minutes earlier, she had dived into the field of an actual battle for the first time and been forced to heal their enemy Dusk Taker. As a result, Takumu aka Cyan Pile had lost when his HP gauge hit zero, Haruyuki aka Silver Crow had lost by decision when time ran out, and both of them had had their points taken by Nomi.

However, they did their best to make their faces say that they didn’t come to yell at her about it. Haruyuki kept moving his arms, while an awkward smile forced its way onto his lips. Chiyuri looked down as if to avoid his eyes, but finally, she said something to her classmates headed for the locker room and broke off from them, approaching Haruyuki and Takumu.

When he saw Chiyuri’s cheeks pale despite the fact that she had just been doing serious physical activity, his intense rage toward Nomi erupted in his heart again. Takumu, next to him, also clenched his fists tightly before taking a deep breath and opening his mouth.

“Chi. I think I already understand why you did what you did. Which is why I just came to say: You don’t need to do what he tells you to.”

“Th-that’s right,” Haruyuki added earnestly. “Right about now, he should be shaking in his boots at the power you have. I mean, with the power to not only recover HP but even destroy weapons, we could put up a real fight against him—no, we could win!”

Chiyuri furrowed her brow momentarily. It was her habit when she was thinking about something but unsure about that something. A few seconds later, she uttered her first words. “No, that’s not it.”

“Huh? Th-that’s not it?” Baffled, he simply parroted her words back in question form, and Chiyuri changed suddenly, a fierce light glittering in both eyes.

“That’s not it,” she repeated, looking at Haruyuki and Takumu in turn. “Nomi’s not forcing me to do anything.”

“Chi…Th-then what…?” It was Takumu’s turn to be stunned. He blinked rapidly as he took a step toward her.

Chiyuri pulled back, out of reach. “Nomi asked me,” she replied, quietly but clearly, “to join him. He said I’d be his personal healer and he’d make sure I got a ton of points. And it’s fine, right? Not like I’m in your Legion or anything yet.” She took another step away from her friends, who were rooted to the spot in astonishment, before continuing. “From now on, we probably shouldn’t have any kind of contact with Nega Nebulus. Because we’re all out in the real to one another. Of course, the contract between Haru and Nomi is a completely separate deal.”

His mind might have gone completely blank and been absolutely unable to grasp what was happening at that moment, but Haruyuki still understood what this “contract” was. It was, in other words, the agreement where Haruyuki paid Nomi ten burst points a week in tribute for two years, so that he could eventually get his flying ability back.

Chiyuri had no interest in fighting him and Takumu on the battlefield. But she didn’t care about Nomi taking points from Haruyuki. That’s what she was saying.

It was shocking, but Haruyuki was hit even harder by Chiyuri referring to herself and Nomi as “we.” For all the years and years he had known her up to that point, when she said “we,” she always meant Chiyuri, Haruyuki, and Takumu.

“’Kay, see you,” she said curtly, avoiding their eyes. She turned adroitly aside and ran off toward the locker room.

All that was left of her presence was the sweet smell of milk, so familiar to him after so long together.