3

Wednesday, April 17.

At dawn on this day, the halfway point for the Umesato ninth-grade school trip, Haruyuki dreamed about Kuroyukihime for the first time in a while. But this one wasn’t the type he had had so many times before, the kind that made him regret not being able to record it. It was, in a way, the total opposite.

In his dream, Kuroyukihime was adorned in her in-school avatar, complete with its spangle butterfly wings on her back, instead of looking like her regular real-world self. The lace hem of the avatar’s black dress fluttered as she ran lightly through the trees of a deep forest.

Haruyuki was his pink pig avatar, and he pumped his short legs intently, chasing the black butterfly. Stretching out her left hand as if beckoning him, the fairy princess gradually grew distant as she bounded along, half flying.

Kuroyukihime! Haruyuki’s shout echoed strangely in the depths of the forest. Please wait for me!

But Kuroyukihime did not stop. Once in a while, she turned, a mysterious smile on her red lips, but each time, his view of her was soon interrupted by a thick, moss-covered tree trunk. Finally, all he could see was the ruby-colored pattern decorating the obsidian wings. And even this glittering, these flickering flames, gradually melted into the gloom.

Don’t leave me. Don’t…Don’t leave me behind! he shouted, but there was no reply. It’s because I lost my wings. That’s why you’re leaving me? You don’t need me anymore?

Still no reply.

Suddenly, a spot on his back throbbed in pain, a pain that quickly took actual form and squirmed violently. Skrrrk! He felt something piercing his avatar from the inside. It wasn’t wings. It was something dark, thin and long like a tail, growing from his back. It twisted into the air, rose up over his shoulder, curving like a sickle, only to stretch out in a straight line like a lance.

From the depths of the woods came an ominous, wet sound.

Haruyuki chased his own tail and staggered around in circles. After he had gone around the umpteenth tree, the scene opened up before him. On the rough and bony surface of a remarkably large tree trunk, a black spangle butterfly was held by a thin pin. The wiry tail extending from Haruyuki’s backside had pierced one of Kuroyukihime’s large wings, fixing her in place, crucifying her.

His thinking curiously inhibited, Haruyuki stood before the butterfly and looked up. There was nothing that could be called an expression on the pale face, so ephemerally beautiful. The eyebrows were simply slightly furrowed, the eyes returning Haruyuki’s stare.

Because you have those wings. Haruyuki heard the voice, twisted with a kind of darkness, slip out from his own mouth. Because you have wings, you can just fly off whenever you want.

His left arm rose on its own. His hand had at some point transformed from the comical hoof of the pig avatar to dark silver claws. His sharp fingertips, shining sinisterly, grabbed the edge of a jet-black wing as it flapped helplessly.

He put the tiniest bit of force into his glittering fingers, and the bottom right of the four wings was ripped out at the base. The wind immediately turned to dry black sand and spilled it from Haruyuki’s hand.

Another.

And still another.

At some point, Kuroyukihime’s head had dropped down heavily, and her limbs dangled loosely.

Now you won’t be able to go anywhere, Haruyuki said as he reached out for the last wing. You’ll be locked in this darkness for all eternity. With me. Just like me.

The instant he plucked the last wing, Kuroyukihime’s slender body fell with a thud into his arms. He held her tightly with the blackish-silver talons.

But a second later, even the body pressed against his chest crumbled into inky particles, which flowed down with a quiet shff, forming a small mountain of sand at his feet—

“Aaaaah!”

Haruyuki bolted upright in his bed, screaming his throat raw. His heart was pounding like an old-school alarm clock, his entire body was covered in a cold sweat, and his mouth was parched.

Blinking sleep-blurred eyes repeatedly, he examined his hands in the gray light filtering through the curtains. Naturally, he found no ominous talons there, just ten plump fingers. Clenching them tightly, he pressed his fist to his forehead.

Unlike the nightmare after he had first gotten Brain Burst six months earlier, his memory of this one was crystal clear, right down to the smallest details. And even more frightening than that, he had taken his Neurolinker off before he’d gone to bed. Which meant the dream now was not due to any interference from the program; it was spun wholly from Haruyuki’s thoughts and memories.

“Kuroyukihime,” he murmured, husky, as he shook his head slowly. “I’ve never wanted to do anything like that. I—I just…”

I want to be together forever, that’s all.

Haruyuki impulsively yanked his Neurolinker down from the shelf above his bed and slipped it around his neck. He turned it on, and once the initial connection was complete, he glanced up at the time display. Six fifteen AM. Way earlier than when he usually woke up, but he was no longer the slightest bit sleepy. The strength drained from his body, and he gave the brief “full dive” command.

“Direct link.”

His dim bedroom disappeared, and a darkness spread out from the other side of a radiating light. Pulled down by the virtual gravity, Haruyuki fell and finally landed on a flat, cold gray surface. Several semitransparent windows with tags like PUBLIC UTILITIES and CONDO ASSOCIATION popped up around him with a crisp ping. This completely functional space was the main console for the Arita home net.

After staring for a while at the round right hand of his pig avatar, Haruyuki whispered a voice command. “Command: dive call. Number: zero one.”

Before his eyes, a holodialog opened. A VOICE CALL WILL BE PLACED TO THE REGISTERED ADDRESS 01. OKAY? He shook off a moment’s hesitation and pressed the YES button.

There were several modes of bidirectional communication using the Neurolinker. The most frequently used was a voice call, conversing vocally like the old cellular phones. Widespread use was also made of video calls, in which you removed the camera from the side of the Neurolinker and talked while your face was recorded.

In contrast with these, the dive call—in which both parties used their avatars to talk in a virtual space—was used only in exceptional circumstances. The reason was simple: It wasn’t always the case that the person being called could immediately go into a full dive. At the very least, you had to mail or make a voice call in advance for an appointment, and the majority of business could be taken care of in such communiqués.

Thus, Haruyuki requesting a dive call at this early hour and completely out of the blue was relatively nonsensical. Even so, he wanted desperately to see her right away. And not just hear her voice or see a flat image, but touch her with all five senses. He felt as though a part of him would change into something else if he couldn’t.

The CALLING in Mincho font blinked eight, nine times, and just before message mode kicked in, the word turned into CONNECTING.

All the windows around him disappeared with a whoosh. A drop of white light appeared in the inorganic gray space, followed by another and then a cascade of particles of white light shifting into the form of an avatar.

Klak! The toes of high heels touched the floor, and the fairy princess, black spangle butterfly wings on her back, blinked slowly two or three times before acknowledging the pig avatar a short distance away from her and smiling gently.

“Hey. Morning, Haruyuki.”

Even after being greeted like this by her smooth, silky voice, Haruyuki couldn’t manage to get any words to leave his mouth, afraid of the premonition that the slender figure before him would turn to sand and crumble. He rubbed his eyes hard.

But of course, no matter how many seconds passed, the avatar did nothing that would lead to her disappearance. Haruyuki came back to himself abruptly and hurriedly opened his mouth.

“Uh, um, good morning, Kuroyukihime. Uhh, I—I’m sorry. Suddenly dive-calling you, and so early…”

“It’s fine. I just woke up and was trying to decide whether I should try to go back to sleep or not.” She smiled again and then examined her surroundings. “And this, well, this is quite the simple place. Although it is like you to prioritize a lighter data load.”

“Oh, uh, no, that’s…”

The initial setting for a dive call meant that the person doing the calling brought their partner into the VR space they dove into. Because Haruyuki had called without moving from the main area of his home net, he’d ended up inviting Kuroyukihime into this world, a place without even a single chair.

“I-I’m sorry. I’ll change the location right away!” Hastily, he pulled up a menu window and flicked through the object sets he had made and saved, but they were all emotionless places—the ruins of a battlefield, the deck of a battleship.

Kuroyukihime looked on wryly as he scrolled through the list, sweating profusely. Finally, she clapped her hands and said, “Maybe it would be a bit heavy data-wise, but perhaps you’ll allow me to load a set I have? I want to try out one I bought yesterday.”

“Oh! Sure! Please! Go ahead! Go ahead!”

Haruyuki nodded so hard he practically bounced, and Kuroyukihime smiled once more before moving her right hand. She navigated the menu with quick gestures, playing a virtual piano.

A progress bar popped up before Haruyuki’s eyes. An object set was being sent from the Neurolinker of Kuroyukihime in far-off Okinawa, via the global net. Because it was a large file, it took five seconds for him to receive and two seconds to unzip and open. As the bar disappeared, powerful lightning—no, sunlight—poured down from above his head, and the cold emptiness around him evaporated.

Appearing in its place was a southern country scene with enough color to jolt him fully awake. Maybe it was a shrine: Hearth-protecting stone lion statues known as shisa were covered in moss and set on both sides of a short pilgrim’s path. Windmill palm trees surrounded them, and at the end of that path were stone steps that led downward, while even farther off in the distance, he could see the azure sea.

When he turned around, there was a small vermilion shrine. Next to him, Kuroyukihime snapped open her parasol and held it above their heads. As if this were a switch, the chirping of countless cicadas closed in on them from all sides, and Haruyuki breathed deeply of air that smelled like the sun.

“Why don’t we sit over there and talk?”

She pointed at the small stairs built directly in front of the shrine. He nodded his assent, and with gravel crunching beneath their feet, Haruyuki came to sit his avatar down next to hers. For a while, he just took in the scene spreading out before his eyes, both foreign and familiar at the same time.

Although this was, of course, a VR space built from digital data, it wasn’t just an arrangement of ready-made polygons. The shisa, the palm trees—all the objects were created based on a real scene photographed with a special high-resolution camera. This kind of object set, reproducing in detail a picturesque scene, was currently the standard trip souvenir.

Haruyuki, who had never been off the main island of Honshu, much less all the way down to Okinawa, forgot that he had initiated the call, and kept staring almost dumbfounded at the scene around him. Kuroyukihime very patiently sat next to him as he did, but at last, she cleared her throat with a small cough.

“Although personally, I have absolutely no objection to just looking at the scenery like this with you…”

Haruyuki jerked his head to look up at the lovely face of the fairy princess beside him and finally remembered that this was the continuation of his thoughtless, early morning dive call.

“Oh, uh! I-I-I’m sorry!”

“No need to apologize. I just wondered if you didn’t have some pressing business.” She gazed at him, smiling.

Haruyuki realized an even more fearful fact. That is, he did not in actuality have a single thing that could be called business of any sort. Just that he had had a dream at dawn, and it had been a very scary dream…

Abruptly, the sensation of pulling the wings off of her back in the nightmare came back to life in his hands, and he screwed up his face, clenched his fists, and dropped his eyes.

His Neurolinker appeared to have dug from deep in his mind the words that then came out of his mouth, rather than from his brain’s language center. “Uh…Um, I was lonely.” Still not totally aware of what he was saying, Haruyuki let his duplicate self do the talking. “Not being able to see you. Being so far away from you for so long’s been hard. So, uh…”

The virtual forest hushed around him. He didn’t know if the cicada sound effect had actually stopped or if his own brain was blocking the environmental audio information. After a long silence, the reply he received was short.

“Me, too.”

The shoulders of the pig avatar shook slightly, and he looked up ever so timidly to see her pale face frowning.

“I’m lonely, too, Haruyuki.”

Unable to completely hold back a smile through her tears, Kuroyukihime raised both hands and held Haruyuki’s cheeks firmly between them. “This is the first time a mere week has felt so long, despite the fact that I’ve done countless continuous dives in the Accelerated World for much, much longer than this. I want to go back to Tokyo and see you again already.”

“…Me, too.”

The instant he squeezed the words out, Kuroyukihime bit her lip hard. Between her arms, she yanked Haruyuki’s head to her chest.

A sweet scent and a gentle, radiant warmth not possible in the Umesato local net (because an avatar’s sense of touch was severely diluted there) raced along Haruyuki’s nervous system. Normally, he would be panicking and turning into a stiff board-person, but right now, he was stirred by an overwhelming longing, and as if in a trance, he reached his hands out to cling to her slim body.

Please come home. That’s what he wanted to say. Please come home and help me like you always do.

In that moment, Haruyuki became acutely aware of how close to his limit he had been pushed. No matter how desperately he fought, his enemy—Dusk Taker—continued to stand, as though a dark steel wall sneering at his efforts, a wall Silver Crow’s slender fists could neither pierce nor climb.

But he couldn’t say it.

It wasn’t just for Chiyuri. For his own sake, too, he had to fight this enemy right to the end with his own power. Giving in to despair now and using Kuroyukihime as a crutch while she was on her school trip would be basically what he had done in the dream.

“We’ll be able to see each other soon, right?” Haruyuki muttered finally in a hoarse voice. “Only three more days.”

“Mmm. That’s true,” Kuroyukihime responded, and after putting all her strength into her arms for one final squeeze, she released her embrace. Black eyes shining, she locked eyes with her junior, leaning in close.

“Haruyuki…”

She said his name anxiously, as if she had discovered something in those eyes.

But Haruyuki mustered every ounce of mental strength he had to put a smile on his face. “Um, I really want you to have fun in your last few days on the trip,” he said, before she could say anything else. “I’m sorry for calling you so out of the blue like this.”

“No, if you hadn’t called me, I would’ve called you. I’m happy to see you, even if it is our avatars doing the seeing. I’ll buy you the real thing for a souvenir, so look forward to that.” Grinning, Kuroyukihime stood up and crunched onto the gravel. She twirled her parasol, closed it, and called up the menu window.

She pushed the DISCONNECT button, and even after her form had turned into particles of light and disappeared, Haruyuki continued to sit where he was. The cries of the cicadas, louder again, wiped away the lingering remains of the nightmare still in his heart.

After a breakfast of cereal and milk, he called into his mother’s bedroom that he was leaving. Opening the door to his condo, he was greeted by a dull, cloudy, leaden sky.

Focusing his eyes on the icons lined up on the left of his virtual desktop, he pressed the weather report shortcut. The probability of rain was 72 percent after 12:40 PM. He took a step back, grabbed a light gray umbrella from beside the shoe cabinet, and went outside.

The tool known as an umbrella was probably one of the everyday-life accessories that had had the same basic structure the longest. At most, the fabric had changed to a nondegradable, water-resistant one, and the skeleton to high-modulus carbon.

Idly noting that rainy days would be a little more fun if his umbrella at least had an automatic closing gimmick like the one on the parasol Kuroyukihime’s avatar was equipped with, Haruyuki walked down the hall and stepped onto the elevator. When the car, having begun its descent to the ground, stopped after a mere two floors, Haruyuki had a premonition that was a near certainty.

And, of course, standing on the other side of the doors as they slid open was Chiyuri Kurashima.

Meeting his gaze squarely, Chiyuri’s large, catlike eyes wavered as if she were hesitating. Despite the fact that she would normally jump in with a hearty “Mornin’!” her black shoes now stayed perfectly aligned; she did not move.

Several seconds passed, and the moment the door began to move again, Haruyuki reflexively pushed the OPEN button with his left hand. He obstinately continued to stare at her face, hand on the button.

Just as the warning buzzer was on the verge of sounding, she lowered her eyes and quietly stepped in.

“Thanks. Morning,” she said with a small voice as Haruyuki released the button.

“Mornin’,” he replied in a whisper, looking sidelong at the light peach umbrella she held in her left hand as she stood a good deal farther away from him than usual in the moving elevator.

Long after he got off the elevator, the words that should have come next from his mouth filled his brain. No matter what Seiji Nomi told you, you don’t have to obey him. If he’s threatening you and the threat is the hidden video from the shower room, he can’t actually use that or anything. Because the instant he destroyed Haruyuki with that video, Haruyuki could broadcast Nomi’s real-world information in the Accelerated World and take Nomi down with him.

But it was also clear to him that Chiyuri probably wouldn’t agree with this kind of “deterrence through mutual assured destruction.” If it meant he would be expelled for an extremely shameful crime—there was even the slight possibility he would be arrested—she would do whatever it took to avoid that outcome. Even, for instance, be forced to be Dusk Taker’s personal healer and stand against Haruyuki and Takumu in the Accelerated World.

Because they were friends. Because they were childhood friends who had spent a long, long time together in the real world. For Chiyuri, this was the most important thing, something to be defended above all else.

“Chiyu.” Haruyuki said the name of his childhood companion in a voice so tiny it threatened to be swallowed up by the very modest sound of the elevator continuing its descent.

Her small shoulders twitched, but her lips remained firmly fastened shut. He dropped his eyes to her hand, the one that clutched the umbrella. He wanted to grab it and pull her toward him, but the words he would have said glommed together into a hot lump and stuck in his throat.

So Haruyuki stayed where he was, his body rooted to the spot as the weight of gentle deceleration enveloped him. The door opened, and Chiyuri proceeded briskly toward the entrance without looking back.

Having had his track team friend ripped away from him in what felt like the blink of an eye, Haruyuki trudged to school, head hanging, just like the trek home the day before.

Wednesdays, he normally went to buy the package edition of his favorite comics magazine at the convenience store, but today he just didn’t feel like it and passed by without stopping.

Alternately feeling the delight of the dive call with Kuroyukihime and the pain of not having talked to Chiyuri about anything, he arrived on the road to the school—one-third less congested than usual with the new ninth graders off on their trip—and finally stepped through the Umesato Junior High gates, hunched into himself. His Neurolinker automatically connected to the in-school local net, and the attendance log time, the day’s schedule, notifications from the school, and more were listed, pop, pop, pop, on the right side of his field of vision. At the end of this list, he saw the sentence IMPORTANT INFORMATION ITEM: PERSONAL in red characters and frowned.

After changing into his school shoes at the entrance, stifling the sense of something ominous approaching, he touched the row of characters with a finger. Shp! The message text opened, and stern Mincho-font characters lined up before him.

“Haruyuki Arita, student No: 460017, grade eight, class C: As soon as you arrive at school, report to the counseling office on the first floor of the general classroom wing.

—Koji Sugeno, class C homeroom teacher”

His heart stopped for a second. He wondered if Nomi had actually turned the video in to the school authorities. However, he quickly noticed that the message had been sent by his homeroom teacher. If Sugeno had such clear evidence as the video, the whole thing would be way beyond the level of a teacher interview; the administration would definitely be brought in. Sugeno was probably calling him in now based on his own personal hunch.

As Haruyuki tried to guess at what awaited him, he passed the stairs to his classroom, clenched hands drenched in a cold sweat, and headed toward the counseling office on the first floor of the building. As he did, he opened the local net’s student database in a browser window and searched for something along the lines of “manual for when the teacher calls you to his office” as a kind of last-ditch effort.

And it turned out, there had been an article on that very subject in the school paper a few years earlier, which Haruyuki read, dumbfounded and grateful.

When he arrived in front of the counseling office, he quickly checked that there were no other students in the hallway around him, in line with the first part of the manual. He then took a deep breath in front of the gray door and pressed the entry button displayed in his vision. The system authenticated him, and the lock opened with a clack.

He opened the—not automatic, of course—door and looked inside to see that Sugeno was already there in the somewhat small room. He was sitting at a chair by the window at a long desk, with his arms crossed in front of his chest, as if to show off their thickness.

“You’re here? Come in.” The welcome from the young Japanese instructor was not very friendly.

Resisting the urge to just shut the door again, Haruyuki cautiously stepped into the room and greeted his teacher with an indistinct “Good morning.”

Sugeno sighed almost complainingly, but perhaps rethinking his approach, he closed his mouth and started over. “Good morning. Sit down here.”

Unable to say, No, I’m fine standing, he had no choice but to obey and take the seat indicated, a mere chair length away from Sugeno.

“Arita.” A single wrinkle carved deep into his suntanned face, his teacher turned a gaze on him that was more than looking but not quite glaring, and then abruptly and finally pulled the corners of his mouth up. “The truth is, I might look like this now, but back when I was in school, I wasn’t popular at all with the girls.”

“Huh…?”

“It’s true. I was on the judo team, see? I used to be so jealous of the guys on the soccer team. They had one girlfriend after another.”

He stared in mute amazement as Sugeno nodded in agreement with himself. What he just said is totally not okay in at least four different ways, he muttered in his head. I mean, he’s saying he looks hot now, no one in judo can get a girlfriend, everyone in soccer is a playboy, and on top of that, he’s assuming girls don’t like me.

Even as he mentally added that he did have to concede that last point, Sugeno continued his monologue.

“Which is why I understand that sometimes, things get to be too much for a boy your age, Arita. I completely get it…Say, Arita?” Here the teacher called up a “you leave everything to me” kind of nuance in the vicinity of his thick eyebrows and nodded deeply. “If there’s anything you want to tell me, anything you need to tell me, you can go on and do that right now, right here. I promise I’m on your side, Arita. How about it?”

“……” Further stupefied, Haruyuki simply stared at the man’s face for several seconds. Finally, he somehow managed to collect his thoughts enough to form words. “Uh, um.”

“Oh! What is it? You can tell me anything!”

“Uhh…Before I say anything, I’d like to record this conversation.” Number two in the manual was to make sure you record, but the instant the words had left his mouth, Haruyuki seriously regretted having said anything.

Sugeno’s eyes popped open, and his face—from neck to cheeks to hairline—turned red. When the trusty older-brother expression on his face finally peeled off and dropped away, Haruyuki could practically hear the thud of it on the floor.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Arita?! Are you saying you don’t trust your teacher?!” his now-menacing mentor shouted, eyebrows leaping up, and Haruyuki shrank with a yelp.

But there was no retreating. “No, it’s got nothing to do with trusting anyone,” he mumbled. “It’s just that a student has the legal right to record a one-on-one interview with a teacher.”

“What legal?! What right?!” Sugeno cried out in a voice that was a little inappropriate for a teacher, and slammed his hand down on the long desk. “Don’t you understand that I’m talking to you now for your own benefit?! The longer this goes on, the worse things are going to be for you! Right now, there’s still a chance of keeping the police out—”

Cutting him off midsentence was Haruyuki fiddling with his virtual desktop to activate Record mode, in complete desperation. Since he didn’t work for the school paper, he needed his interlocutor’s consent to record their conversation. In Sugeno’s field of vision at that moment, there would be a button asking him to give permission to be recorded. If he pressed NO now, the log would record that he had rejected a legitimate request. Sugeno glared at a point in space, seething with indignation, but in the end, he lifted a finger and stabbed at the air.

In Haruyuki’s field of view, the REC icon began blinking, accompanied by a message that recording had begun. He did not, however, have anywhere close to the nerve required to smirk at this, so he shrank intently into himself as Sugeno began to speak again.

“Arita, tell me one thing…please.” Sugeno’s voice was harder now, and quieter. “On the fourteenth, a Sunday, why would a guy like— Why did you come to school, when you’re not in any clubs or teams?”

Seems like recording the conversation is more effective than I expected.

“To see my friend on the kendo team,” Haruyuki answered immediately, albeit faintly, and Sugeno held his tongue. He had to know that Takumu (in kendo) and Haruyuki were friends, and the fact that Takumu had come to school on Sunday was registered in the local net. And the original reason Haruyuki had come to school that day was in fact to talk to Takumu.

But Sugeno doubled down, temples twitching. “Was it really just that? Can you tell me you had absolutely no other reason? Look into my eyes and answer me.”

He’s probably not a bad guy, Haruyuki thought. Although I don’t think we’re going to reach any understanding here. He looked up into Sugeno’s icy eyes. “It was really just that. I can tell you that.”

After letting out a long sigh that sounded like a large cooling fan, Sugeno said, “Okay, understood. In that case, you can go.”

Haruyuki quickly stood up. “Yes, Mr. Sugeno!” he said, his voice the loudest it had been since he entered the room. He covered the short distance to the door, opened it the barest minimum required, and slipped out.

Having fled to the hallway, he took the deepest breath he was capable of before turning off record mode and checking that the sound file was properly saved as he trotted toward his classroom. As long as nothing new came out, the recording was basically public acknowledgment of his innocence. That said, this little exchange had probably seriously soured Sugeno on him. There was not a single advantage in making an enemy of a teacher, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Haruyuki liked to do, but confessing to being behind the secret camera just to keep Sugeno happy, when he hadn’t done anything, was obviously out of the question.

Still, Haruyuki thought as he climbed the stairs. This trap Nomi set, even if he doesn’t use that fatal video, it looks like it’s having a sort of seeping effect, like a weak poison. Because Nomi actually courted that danger and really hid a small camera in there.

As a result, there actually had been an attempt to record secret video in the girls’ shower room, and Haruyuki had ended up the prime suspect, coming as he had to school on a Sunday, even though he was not on any teams. Had Nomi seen this far ahead? No, impossible.

Shaking his head, Haruyuki opened the door to his classroom a minute before the first bell. Instantly, he got the sense that something wasn’t right. It seemed like the chatter filling the classroom dropped in volume for the briefest moment.

“……?” He looked around, but it was already the same old morning classroom again. He wove his way through the students in groups of twos and threes, chatting animatedly about net shows and sports, and sat down at his own desk.

He hung his bag on the hook on his desk, and as he breathed a little sigh, the VOICE CALL icon began flashing in the middle of his field of view. The caller was…Takumu. Haruyuki resisted the urge to turn around and look at him sitting toward the back of the class and pressed the icon.

“Haru, we got trouble.”

At this abrupt opening, Haruyuki very nearly opened his mouth to speak, but caught himself and replied in neurospeak. “Huh? Wh-what’s up, out of the blue?”

“There’s this weird rumor going around. About you.”

The call was abruptly cut off. At the same time, a light chiming sounded in his ears. The bell ringing, which meant any real-time communication between students was now prohibited. The next time it would be possible to call would be lunch break. As an exception to this rule, he could send a text mail, but exchanges not directly related to classes were forbidden by the school regulations.

He thought he might just stand up and go over to Takumu to hear the rest directly, but then the front door opened, and Sugeno came in, so he was forced to abandon the idea. Although he really wanted to know the rest of the story, if it was something that simply had to be communicated to him right then and there, they could always talk in an accelerated duel. If Takumu didn’t take it that far himself, then it wouldn’t be a huge mistake to wait until the next break.

Having determined this, Haruyuki stood up with the other students and bowed to the teacher without meeting his eyes.

But immediately after that class was over, two boys came to stand in front of his desk as he raised a finger to mail Takumu. Reflexively stiffening, he lifted his face. Both were in his class, but he only remembered the name of the boy on the right. He was pretty sure it was Ishio and that he was a starting player on the boys’ basketball team.

“Arita,” Ishio said, jerking to the left the very adult-looking head he had sitting on a body so tall—it was hard to believe he was the same age as Haruyuki. “Sorry to bug you, but you got a minute?”

Before he knew it, the entire class had fallen silent. But this silence didn’t have any sense of surprise to it. Rather, there was an air of approval, as if his classmates had even been expecting this scene.

Ishio turned toward the frozen Haruyuki, who was unable to grasp what was happening, and continued in a low voice that was nearly through the awkward breaking period. “I don’t want to have an ugly conversation right here. And I know you don’t, either, right, Arita?”

Haruyuki felt his stomach tighten abruptly. Ugly conversation. Hearing those words, only one thing leapt to mind. The secret video. Which meant that Ishio here and the boy next to him—no, everyone in class—had, without him even being aware of it, become deeply convinced that Haruyuki was the perpetrator of the whole thing.

“Ah…I—I…,” Haruyuki muttered hoarsely. He groped for a lifeboat of some kind, and his eyes moved to the seat diagonally in front of him—Chiyuri.

His childhood friend was sitting there, head hanging low, eyes pinched shut, fists clenched tightly on her desk as though she were trying to endure something.

Despite the crisis he was facing, the instant he saw her, he thought, Right now, the one making Chiyuri suffer is me, not Nomi. My stupidity got us into this. If I act all pathetic right here, it’s just going to make this harder for Chiyuri. So the least I can do is be strong now. Even if it is just pretend.

He took a deep breath and stood up, chair clattering. “Sure, let’s go,” he replied briefly, and one of Ishio’s eyebrows jumped up. But he nodded, expression unchanging, and began to walk. The other boy followed, almost like Haruyuki was a prisoner with an escort.

He saw a student standing slowly in the back of the classroom. Takumu. His friend, rivaling Ishio in height, narrowed his sharp eyes behind his glasses and went to take a step. Haruyuki stopped him with his right hand and shook his head shortly.

I’m okay. I can get through this by myself.

They weren’t on a voice call, so Takumu couldn’t actually hear these words, but even so, he gritted his teeth and took his seat again. The sound of Ishio yanking open the door echoed loudly in the silent classroom.

They brought him to a place Haruyuki was intimately familiar with—the western edge of the roof. Given that first period had only just ended, there were no other students up there. When he was in seventh grade, Haruyuki had been forced to deliver bread and juice to some delinquent students in this place basically every day. Vivid memories of that time springing to life in his mind, Haruyuki started to head for the shadow of the antenna tower, the set location for any kind of bullying.

But Ishio stopped him. “Here’s good.”

“But this is still in view of the social cameras, you know,” he replied, blinking hard.

“I don’t care,” Ishio spat. He shoved both hands into the pockets of his uniform and leaned back against the high steel railing before continuing. “Arita, you got called in by Sugeno, yeah?”

I knew it. The whole class already knows about it. So this is the “weird rumor” Taku called about. I was trying to be careful, but some other student must have seen me going into the counselor’s office. But still, news of that has gotten around pretty fast. Almost like someone was deliberately spreading the rumor…

And then Haruyuki reminded himself that now was not the time for thinking outside thoughts, and he stared at Ishio and the other boy standing a little way off before nodding slightly. “Yeah.”

“So then it was you? The one who put the camera in the girls’ shower room?”

“No!” This time, his reply was immediate.

Ishio looked down on Haruyuki shaking his head and simply rubbed a hand over hair so short it was practically shaved.

“Well.” The other boy spoke for the first time. “You can’t exactly say, ‘I sure did,’ can you? But, look, I just don’t think the school’s gonna be calling a student in with no evidence. I mean, if it goes badly, they’d have a complaint against them instead.”

It’s just that hothead Sugeno! I mean, he actually got mad about rights and the law and whatever! He could insist on his innocence all he wanted, but he knew they wouldn’t believe him, so his best option was to keep his mouth shut.

Ishio then took one, two steps to approach Haruyuki. “You got released after getting called in, so I guess they suspect you but don’t have any proof?” he said in a near-whisper. “But here’s the thing, I can’t just let it go because there’s no proof.” Ishio suddenly grabbed Haruyuki’s tie with his left hand and yanked him in. Haruyuki got a close-up taste of the other boy’s rage-filled eyes. “Listen. My girlfriend was in the shower room when they found that camera. The whole thing hit her really hard. She was out from school yesterday and again today!”

At this point, Ishio’s behavior was a clear violation of school regulations. But the starting player for the basketball team brushed off the other boy, who tried to stop him, and brandished his right fist in a showy manner. “There’s no way I can let this go, Arita. I have to do this, no chooooiiiice!!” He thrust his fist forward awkwardly.

Haruyuki probably could have dodged the blow. Ishio’s fist was clumsy and couldn’t begin to compare with the punches from the students who used to bully Haruyuki, boys well acquainted with fighting. He could even go a step further—if he used the “physical burst” command to accelerate physically, maybe he could turn the tables and beat the taller boy instead. As it was, Ishio’s face was twisted up into what amounted to a confession that he had never hit anyone before.

But, of course, Haruyuki did not dodge or retaliate, but simply took the punch to his left cheek. Winning a fight with the power of acceleration was the lowest of the low, even if it wasn’t against the rules of the Black Legion. He heard a sharp crack, and for all its awkwardness, Ishio’s fist made an impact that pushed Haruyuki’s body back a few steps.

The Haruyuki of six months earlier maybe would have broken at this point and sniveled an apology. But he stopped after those few staggered steps and glared at Ishio as he felt the hot throbbing in his cheek. “I don’t care how many times I have to say it,” he shouted. “I didn’t do it!!”

Ishio clenched his teeth and made another fist, but at last, he relaxed his hand. “If you can prove that,” he replied, “you can hit me as many times as you want. But”—the basketball player with the shaved head thrust out a finger this time, rather than a fist, and declared crisply—“if it turns out you did do it, I’ll smash that Neurolinker of yours and make it so you can’t look at any images or videos or anything.”

And then he whirled around and took long strides toward the stairs, rubbing his right hand with his left as if trying to wipe away the lingering sensation. The other boy followed suit, and Haruyuki was left alone on the roof.

This little bit of theater had to have been clearly recorded by several social cameras. If Haruyuki lodged a complaint about having been hit, regardless of the circumstances, Ishio would at the very least be suspended and probably lose his spot on the basketball team’s starting lineup.

But, of course, Haruyuki had no intention of doing that. Ishio was just another person who’d gotten dragged into this mess. Into this lightless, heatless nihilistic vortex that the cruel villain Seiji Nomi had created.

Running a hand over his left cheek to check that he wasn’t bleeding, Haruyuki trudged toward the stairs. As he walked, he opened his mail app and typed a short message to Takumu.

“It didn’t turn into anything big. I’ll explain everything after school. Sorry to make you worry,” he wrote briefly, hit SEND, and then started to reach for Chiyuri’s address. But on the verge of touching it, he yanked his hand back. He couldn’t erase Chiyuri’s fears with mere words anymore. The only way to get her back was to destroy Nomi, the source of all the problems.

A simple “Got it” soon came back from Takumu. He felt his friend’s concern in that brevity, and finally relaxing his shoulders, Haruyuki trotted back to the classroom so that he could be on time for his next class.

Lunch break.

The bell had no sooner rung than Haruyuki was headed for the cafeteria by himself.

The cafeteria, too, with the missing ninth graders, was naturally a fair bit emptier than usual. Not feeling much like eating some bread up on the roof, where he had so recently had such an unpleasant experience, he lined up at the self-service counter. From the menu displayed in his field of vision, he selected pork curry with a boiled okra topping and checked that the holotag was floating in front of him. The lunch lady dished out the curry at superhigh speed, set the okra on it, pushed it onto the counter, and the bill was settled with a ringing sound. He grabbed the tray with both hands and looked around for a place to sit.

His gaze naturally moved to the lounge at the eastern edge of the cafeteria. But he didn’t have the courage to charge into the space with its round white tables surrounded by plants and its obviously different atmosphere by himself, so instead he plopped himself down in a corner of one of the zillions of long tables. He picked up his spoon and glanced around. All the other students were enjoying their lunch, laughing and talking. No one was looking at Haruyuki. Or so he thought.

But he couldn’t help feeling like everyone in the place was talking to one another telepathically. The secret-video criminal is here. No, that was impossible. He tried to shake the feeling off, but the indescribable weirdness of the moment he entered eighth-grade class C that morning had soaked into his skin.

To at least forget it, he started jamming curry into his mouth, but the blockage in his throat didn’t seem to be going anywhere, even though just curry in his mouth was normally enough to make him unconditionally happy.

What if…

What if this thinking, this awareness of “Arita in class C’s the one who did the secret video” thing, took root among all the students, whether there was proof of it or not?

Wouldn’t it be hard for even Kuroyukihime, the student council vice president, to uproot it? In fact, she might be dragged down by Haruyuki and lose her current standing. Even if, hypothetically speaking, that did happen, she would never dream of abandoning him, but what if, because of him, they all gave Kuroyukihime the cold shoulder, too? What if she was alienated within the school like he had been last year, or in the worst case, she ended up the butt of jokes?

Haruyuki felt goose bumps shudder up onto his skin. He dropped his spoon onto his plate with a clank and grabbed his arms tightly with both hands. At that moment, he felt an abrupt presence and lifted his face.

A group of four or five people walking off in the distance greeted his eyes.

At the private Umesato Junior High School, there was a sports department scholarship system of sorts. The school wasn’t particularly famous for sports, so the system was more on the level of a slight reduction in tuition for players who did well enough to make it to the intercity tournament level or higher. Even so, there was no doubt that there was a clear category of “scholarship student elites.”

The group on which Haruyuki’s eyes had landed was made up of a few of these sports athletes. A starting player on the girls’ softball team, the hope of the boys’ swim team, and a small student chatting away in the middle of them—

No mistake, it was a seventh grader from the kendo team, Seiji Nomi.

The kendo team at Umesato was definitely strong, but Nomi had just joined it that month; he hadn’t been out to a real tournament yet. The earliest he’d be able to obtain scholarship student status would be in the latter half of that year, but they’d already welcomed him into their group, which meant that his win at the team tournament the previous week had made a real impact.

But you didn’t even win that tournament with your own power!

Haruyuki unconsciously bit his lip, hard. At that time, as if sensing his eyes glaring from the corner of the long table in the distance, Nomi turned his gaze toward him with a casual gesture.

Haruyuki saw the cherubic smile on his feminine face instantly transform. Appearing from beneath the mask that peeled off was a cold, sadistically joyful grin, a thin razor sharpened to the extreme. Haruyuki felt as though he could hear his voice in the back of his mind.

What do you think, Arita? What’s it like to be covered in mud, slipping endlessly down this hill? Having all your precious things taken from you one by one and smashed?

Nomi faced forward again to turn his original innocent smile upon the upperclassmen as he entered the brilliantly lit lounge without the slightest hesitation.

Even after the plants blocked him from view and Haruyuki could no longer see him, he continued to glare at the place where Nomi had been for a long time.

There was no doubt about it now. Nomi was the one who had spread the story of Haruyuki being interviewed by his homeroom teacher so fast to the class. Not only that, but given the situation, it was probably him who had tipped the school authorities off about Haruyuki having come to school on Sunday.

Abruptly, an enormous rage and an even greater terror erupted from the depths of his body, and Haruyuki desperately suppressed the urge to flip the table. No. He couldn’t let his spirit be broken here. That would just be a return to his cowardly self of six months earlier. And not only that. If he lost heart now and sank to the bottomless depths of the bog that Nomi had created, he’d be dragging Takumu and Chiyuri—and Kuroyukihime—down with him.

It starts now, Haruyuki murmured in his heart as he robotically shoveled curry with his spoon. I’ve faced this level of adversity a hundred times. I’ll show him. I’ll crawl back up one more time. No, I’ll get up again a million times. I’m done looking at the ground.

He opened his mouth wide, stuffed his cheeks with the curry piled high on his spoon, and chewed forcefully. The freshman girl sitting diagonally across from him gaped and stared in shock at Haruyuki cleaning his plate with incredible speed.