7

Haruyuki, as the duel avatar Silver Crow, found himself standing on a water tank sticking out from the roof of a building. The city unfolding in all directions around him was colored with countless neon lights, similar to the scene he had witnessed before diving. Lights and lasers from the ground illuminated the clouds hanging low in the night sky, an airship with enormous glowing advertisement panels passed over his head, and commercials in a bizarre language popped up here and there in the town. But this was of course not the Akihabara of the real world. It was a 3-D file re-created from the images in the social camera net. The affiliation was “Downtown.”

Haruyuki quickly crouched down and checked the HP gauges in the top of his field of vision. His gauge was on the left, and right below that, the gauge of Blood Leopard, his tag partner, was displayed slightly smaller. And under the gauge glittering in the top right was, as expected, the name Rust Jigsaw.

He caught his breath under his silver mask and stared at the small light blue cursor floating in the center of his vision. The enemy should be in that direction. Luckily or maybe not, as in the Century End stage, entry into buildings was not permitted in the Downtown stage, so he had apparently gotten some distance and relocated himself.

Okay then, first, I gotta hook up with Pard—

As soon as he had this thought, he heard a still voice from behind and whirled around.

“’Kay. We got a bite.” Although he heard no footfalls or even sensed her presence, the tall, lean avatar had, in the blink of an eye, popped up right behind him.

Her overall form was very similar to the leopard-headed rider she’d used in the bar. However, rather than the leather, a dark red matte armor covered her whole body. Her mask was bullet-shaped, protruding in the front, with something like ears sticking up on the end on both sides, making her look not unlike a wild feline of some kind. The most conspicuous part of the sleek, smart silhouette was her bulging thighs.

The very nimble-looking avatar crouched down next to him, and Blood Leopard, level-six Burst Linker, member of Prominence Legion, continued, “You and I are both close-range types; our enemy, in contrast, is a mid-to long-range. He’ll first try to split us up here with a range attack, and then come to take you out. So don’t launch any reckless counterattacks; make not getting separated from me your top priority.”

“…R-roger.” Haruyuki nodded.

Half a second later.

Zzzeeee! An earsplitting vibration approached rapidly from the direction of the cursor, and Haruyuki reflexively leapt back.

After a slight delay, the water tank he had been standing on until then split completely in two. The water gushing out spread out on the roof, and, careful not to step in it, he ran over to Leopard. She had leapt much farther than he had and had her back pressed up against the ventilation tower.

“That just now should have been his long-distance attack Wheel Saw,” she explained, words coming almost too fast to hear, and, remembering what the Matchmaker had told them about Rust Jigsaw’s abilities, Haruyuki also responded at high speed.

“The technique where he sends a saw blade flying, right? But it’s so dark, it’s basically impossible to see the actual blade, huh?”

“Our only hope’s the sound. It doesn’t seem like he can shoot them off in succession, so after we dodge the next one, we go hard.”

“’K-kay.” He didn’t have the time to nod before the whine came at them again.

Straining his eyes—or rather his ears—at the source of the noise, Haruyuki jumped out ahead and to the right. An extremely thin ring spinning incredibly fast whirred by to his immediate left, slicing through the ventilation tower and sending it crumbling to the ground.

Haruyuki had no time to watch it, however; he was desperately trying to keep up with Blood Leopard bounding ahead of him. The red leopard avatar was definitely more than moderately quick. She reached the edge of the building in a few steps, almost as if she were flying instead of running, and threw her body into the sky without a moment’s hesitation.

It was nearly twenty meters to the edifice on the other side of the wide road wedged in between the lines of buildings. The leopard flew light as a cloud through the neon-colored air.

She wants me to jump, too?!

Don’t think, just go!

Haruyuki pushed this transient thought into his right leg and pushed off with everything he had. The air whistled past his ears, and the roof of the building on the other side raced toward him. His feet dug into the structure a mere ten centimeters or so from the concrete edge. But he didn’t get the chance to breathe a sigh of relief. The outline of his enemy was already visible on the roof of the next building over, which was flush against the one he was standing on. The linear silhouette caught the lights of the town and glittered a rusty red.

Rust Jigsaw! Haruyuki shouted in his mind. Are you Nomi’s—Dusk Taker’s friend?! Are you blocking the list the same way?! What the hell is your secret?!

Almost as if laughing at Haruyuki’s frustration, Rust Jigsaw spread his hands very broadly and turned deftly aside, retreating to a building behind him with unexpected speed.

“As if I’d let you get away!” Haruyuki cried in a low voice, and he stepped into a fierce dash. He might not have his wings, but he could still catch a long-distance type with his speed—

“Stop.”

If he hadn’t eased up on the gas pedal the slightest bit at her sharp call, his head would no doubt have gone flying.

Suddenly, something hit his throat hard. Something thin and biting. Then a whining vibration assaulted him, and orange sparks scattered like blood. His HP gauge was crunched down, together with his neck armor.

“Ngh!” Clenching his teeth, Haruyuki twisted his body as far as he could to escape whatever it was that was cutting into his neck. Pitching backward, he could definitely see something: an extremely thin line floating horizontally in the air right where Rust Jigsaw had spread out his hands a few seconds earlier.

A jigsaw.

He crashed to the roof on his backside and Blood Leopard grabbed his arm. She had no sooner yanked him to his feet when a round blade came flying from off in the distance to slice through the very place where he had fallen.

After dragging Haruyuki to the shadow of a massive billboard, the leopard said, astonished, “Good thing you’re a metallic color.”

“S-sorry, I forgot. That was his other technique?”

“Steel Saw. Fixing a jigsaw in midair.” Her gold eyes glittered sharply beneath her pointed mask, and Leopard continued, “He keeps us at a distance with the fixed saw and attacks from far off with the round one. He really is the natural enemy of close-range types.”

“Wh-what should we do?”

The big cat thought for a moment. “Give me your special-attack gauge.” Without giving Haruyuki the time to react, she snapped open the mouth hidden behind her mask and bit hard into Silver Crow’s shoulder with needle-sharp teeth.

“Eeah?!” Haruyuki shrieked and was even further astounded by what happened then. His special-attack gauge, down to 30 percent or so thanks to the earlier damage, quickly drained, while Blood Leopard’s increased at the same pace.

Once she had stolen every pixel from his gauge, the leopard released him and shouted, “Shape Change!!”

On both hands on the concrete surface, the avatar shone a momentary deep red before transforming from a human being on all fours to a completely quadrupedal beast. Her back was long and slender, her shoulders swelled with strength, and her rear legs were folded in a Z shape, hiding enormous power.

“Wh-wh—”

“Get on,” Blood Leopard said to the thrice-stunned Haruyuki, in a voice with stronger animal effects applied to it.

Since the only thing he knew for sure was that she would bite him again if he stood there all spaced out, Haruyuki jumped onto the back of the massive beast as if in a dream. The leopard crouched down, and, avoiding the next Wheel Saw that came flying at them from the side, she leapt off in a straight line into the night sky glittering with neon.

“Ngh!” Haruyuki unconsciously yelped in his throat. Her dash was beyond fast. With each push of her powerful legs, they leapt a solid ten meters. Countless decorative lights melted into thin lines and flowed past on both sides of his visual field.

Suddenly, when they had run over too many rooftops to keep track of, Rust Jigsaw’s black shadow rose up before them. He twisted around and opened both hands, a gesture he repeated over and over as he ran. The space in which he did so was likely frozen with lethal jigsaws, but moving at this speed, Haruyuki noted with apprehension that he couldn’t see them.

Abruptly, the leopard bounded in a huge leap to the right. Landing on all fours behind a billboard illuminated by a spotlight, she then took off toward the left to kick down the neon tower there and head to the right again. They were definitely closing in on the enemy, despite the fact that he was running in a straight line, while at the same time avoiding the spaces where Jigsaw had probably placed Steel Saws with his large jumps.

When they were only another three—no, two jumps away, Rust Jigsaw turned around and showed them something new. He drew a large circle in the air with his right hand and waved it directly at Haruyuki and Blood Leopard.

Zzzeeee! The same vibration noise. Wheel Saw. But in the middle of a jump, there was no way Blood Leopard could avoid it—

“Take care of it.”

Haruyuki heard her voice from below him, and he reflexively responded, “’Kay.”

The circular saw was an immensely powerful cutting weapon, but even still, it had its weak points. If it was like the ring that had nearly taken Silver Crow’s head off, there should be no teeth on the inside. And more importantly, it was slower than a bullet.

Of course, if he hadn’t seen Jigsaw launch it, he wouldn’t have been able to get the timing right. But his eyes picked up the extremely thin line slicing through the primary colors of the night sky in the nick of time. Just as it was on the verge of hitting Blood Leopard’s right shoulder, he thrust his hand into the ring from the side as hard as he could.

Shhnk! came the sharp metallic squeal, and sparks scattered from his fingertips. But his slim fingers were not cut off, and he yanked the ring of fifty or so centimeters in diameter and changed its trajectory so that it flipped off into the distance behind them.

His attack sidestepped so daringly when it was so close to its mark, Rust Jigsaw took on a faintly agitated air.

“GJ,” Blood Leopard said simply before taking off in one final bound.

They swooped down on Rust Jigsaw from the front as he had his arms spread out, trying to place a jigsaw in the air. Blood Leopard buried her open jaws deeply in his shoulder.

At the intense impact, Haruyuki was knocked off and fell on his backside, where he watched in amazement the battle/hunt unfolding before his eyes.

“Guh!” Rust Jigsaw—an avatar that looked like a collection of steel frames—let out a low groan as he intently beat at the red leopard hunched over him. But the giant teeth biting deep into his right shoulder held fast like a vise.

If Rust Jigsaw had been a close-range type, he might have been able to turn the situation around. Each time he landed a punch, Leopard’s HP bar did indeed go down, but his was disappearing at a much faster rate. A light effect generated by the damage periodically gushed from the bitten shoulder, red so that it looked almost like real blood. Jigsaw twisted and struggled, but even when he did manage to break free of the teeth, Leopard immediately leapt up to sink them right back in, clearly having no intention whatsoever of allowing him to escape.

After one such attempt—

“Unh…Aaah!!” Rust Jigsaw couldn’t suppress the scream that welled up from below his mask. At the same time, Haruyuki heard an unpleasant metallic snap, and Rust Jigsaw’s right arm was ripped from the socket and fell to the ground.

And with all the damage from that loss, he blew through the rest of his HP gauge. The avatar exploded into a million pieces in that familiar, glass-shattering effect. The text YOU WIN!! flamed to life in the center of his visual field, but Haruyuki could not stand up.

…Holy shit, she’s strong!! This was the only thought swirling in the back of his frozen brain.

The enormous leopard, who had just slaughtered their enemy with her teeth, abruptly raised her head and looked at him with golden eyes. “GG,” she said.

And then the acceleration ended.

Enduring a momentary vertigo as the sensations of his body returned, Haruyuki couldn’t immediately remember what his real-world self was doing, and where.

Thus, as he was about to open his eyes, he couldn’t even begin to guess at what the deeply elastic something was up against his face. He reflexively squeezed his eyes shut again, his body stiffening as he wondered just what it was, when his collar was yanked.

“Get up,” a sharp voice commanded.

His eyelids instantly flew open. He was, of course, in the recliner in the one-person booth in the dive café on the fourth floor of Quadtower. The default setting for Brain Burst was to release a full dive along with the acceleration once a duel was finished, so they had returned to the real world, instead of the bar in Akihabara BG.

The girl in the maid’s outfit who had dived with him from the same chair was already standing and unlocking the booth door. The instant it was open, she poked her head out slightly to check in each direction.

Wondering what she was doing as he slid out of the chair, Haruyuki felt his consciousness chill all at once at the words that followed.

“Let’s go. We might be able to identify him still.”

Identify. Who? No, it was obvious. Rust Jigsaw in the real. But how on earth… He shelved the question and chased after the now-familiar plait swinging against the back of the maid’s uniform.

Briskly but cautiously, Blood Leopard headed for the elevator. She pressed the DOWN button, and they had barely even gotten in the cab before she was talking and talking at tongue-twister speeds in a low voice.

“I did consecutive damage to the right side of Jigsaw’s neck earlier. With that kind of pain stimulation in one spot over a long period, the effect remains for a short time even once you burst out. Look for someone near the entrance looking like that spot is causing him pain.”

“R-roger.” That was a seriously terrifying way of marking someone. But it was probably the only way to make some kind of mark on the real-world body of an enemy in the Accelerated World.

When the elevator stopped at the first floor, Haruyuki swallowed hard as he walked through the boys and girls acting out their fights on the game machines in the real. He shot his eyes around with the bare minimum of movement, but he didn’t see anyone doing anything with their neck. They were all just staring in a trance at the flat, old-school monitors.

Slipping through the floor, Haruyuki and Pard stepped from the building into the throng of the street. They exchanged glances and then wordlessly split up. Heading down the left side of the street, Haruyuki concentrated all his mental powers on the dozens of passersby entering his field of view.

The girls dressed as game characters handing out holopamphlets. The three young people standing at the end of the road, engrossed in conversation. The guy walking restlessly, weighed down by multicolored paper bags—

Haruyuki’s eyes were drawn to the back of a boy he glimpsed on the other side of this crowd. Because he could see the pale neck with no Neurolinker attached to it. With a start, he strained his eyes and saw that the boy’s raised left hand was firmly pressed to the right side of his neck.

Is that him?! Quickening his pace, Haruyuki chased after the boy as he grew distant. Gray team jacket. Faded jeans. Leather cap on his head. Dark brown hair sticking out. Head hanging, the boy was hurrying toward the station. With his left hand still on his neck, he pushed his right hand through space, as if to shove aside the passersby.

Wondering if he shouldn’t call Blood Leopard, Haruyuki turned around for an instant, but her maid’s outfit was lost in the crowd and he couldn’t see her. Giving up on that, he turned to face forward again—

“I hope you’ll join us!” a cute voice chirped, and a hand was thrust in front of him, blocking his way forward. Lifting his face with a start, he was greeted by the smiling face of an older girl advertising some shop. She was probably handing out holopamphlets, but not connected to the global net, Haruyuki couldn’t see anything. He shook his head in apology and slipped by her hand. But…

“H-huh…” He couldn’t see him. The gray-team-jacketed back had disappeared.

Dammit! Biting his lip, he quickened his pace and scanned the area intently. But maybe the boy had turned a corner somewhere because no matter how far forward he went, Haruyuki couldn’t find him. He hurried to retrace his steps, peeking in the narrow alleys to the left and right, but the boy was indeed gone.

“Ngh!” Out of options, he simply stood there, still biting his lip, while the people on the street pushed by looking annoyed at the obstruction. But their irritated faces didn’t register with Haruyuki, either. Only bitter regret and self-reproach filled his heart.

You let your hard-won clue get away.

“Pretty great just seeing his back,” Blood Leopard said when they met up again, but Haruyuki, leaning against the wall of a building, couldn’t look her in the eye.

“I’m sorry. You worked so hard for me.” Self-hatred at his uselessness during the duel and in the chase afterward weighed heavily on his shoulders.

“You worked hard, too.” He felt a hand on his unkempt hair.

“Huh…” He raised his face unconsciously, and something remotely resembling a smile bled onto the lips of the older girl, whose face had until then been perfectly blank.

“You fought wonderfully,” she whispered. “I’ll tell the Matchmaker what you saw of the guy from behind. If we can pick him out in the real the next time Jigsaw shows up, we might be able to learn the secret of list blocking by monitoring him after that. As soon as the logic’s clear, I’ll send you the information.”

“O-okay.”

So maybe, just maybe he could still cling to a thin shred of hope? He comforted himself with this thought and at last returned her smile, although his was likely full of self-pity.

Pard shifted her hand from his head to his shoulder, and her expression returned to its normal nothing. “Jigsaw definitely won’t show up again today. And it’s getting to be time for children to be getting home.”

Pard was at most in eleventh grade, but she compelled him to nod obediently somehow. “Okay.”

Blood Leopard put an end to the night’s adventures in her usual clipped way. “’Kay. Let’s go.”

They left the increasingly busy Electric Town as the clock struck eight, and, immediately returning to Kannana from Mejiro Street, Pard took him straight to Suginami.

“Here’s fine,” Haruyuki told her right around the time the elevated Chuo Line came into sight, and got her to let him off. Returning the helmet, he once again bowed his head deeply. “Um, thank you so much. Really. Spending this much time on another Legion’s problem…”

Here, Pard took off her own helmet and shook her head lightly. “Akihabara BG’s an important place to me, so it’s my problem, too, now. Besides—” She cut herself off and averted her eyes for a moment, a somehow bashful look coming over the face of the Burst Linker in the maid’s outfit. “I wanted to say a proper thank you to you. You protected Rain—my king—when Chrome Disaster happened. Thank you.”

“Huh…”

“I hope you stay friends.” And then Blood Leopard smiled her first clear smile since they’d met, before pulling her helmet back on. The motor roared as the large bike spun around in a U-turn into the opposite lane, and she raced off to the north at an incredible speed.

He watched until her taillight got lost among the lines of vehicles, bit down hard on his lip at all the feelings belatedly welling up in him, and bowed his head deeply, even more deeply, one more time.

Returning to his deserted home, Haruyuki dropped his bag on the floor in his room and practically threw himself down on his bed.

Wonder how Taku’s doing. The thought was in his brain, but it was too much to move his hand to make the call. A physical and mental exhaustion exploded in him and then settled heavily on his back.

He stayed still like that for a while, eyelids gradually growing heavier and heavier, so he shook his head hard and yanked himself up. He couldn’t go to sleep now. He needed to talk to Takumu while his memories of Akihabara were fresh, and he hadn’t even touched that day’s homework yet.

He took off his uniform, and after using that as an excuse to have a shower, he warmed up a frozen seafood casserole in the microwave. While he waited for it to be done, he connected his Neurolinker to the global net and placed a voice call to Takumu.

“Hey, Haru.” The voice that replied seemed to be the same as always, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“’Sup…You okay? You remember all the stuff up until today?” Haruyuki asked nervously in neurospeak, but the air of a wry grin came through the connection.

“Hey, hey, I wasn’t under for as long as all that. Although I did dive for a full week.”

“A-and your Incarnate training was good…?”

“Yeah.” A short groan of a voice. “Although the Red King’s call was that I still have a long way to go before I can use it in a real fight. But I got the trigger at least.”

“You did? You’re such a perfectionist, though. Don’t go diving all by yourself in the Neutral Unlimited Field and spend however many years training!” Haruyuki said, breathing a second sigh of relief, and Takumu laughed again.

“I definitely don’t have the energy left for that. Anyway, what about you? You get anything on Dusk Taker and his list-blocking secret?”

“That turned out a whole lot different than I expected.”

Haruyuki told him the series of incidents from the moment he left the isolation room at the cake shop, summarizing and simplifying the parts related to Blood Leopard as much as possible. Even still…

“Hmm. So while I was all sad and alone doing my training, you were on another date with an older girl, huh?” was Takumu’s first comment.

“I-it wasn’t like that at all!” Haruyuki hurried to protest. “A-and anyway, you were with Niko for a whole week—”

“Sorry to say, she only instructed me at the beginning and at the end. For the rest of it, she said something about how she had come all this way, so she might as well hunt some Enemies to earn points and disappeared.”

“Sh-she did, huh?” Before the conversation veered into even stranger directions, Haruyuki wrestled it back on topic. “Anyway, about the list-blocking mechanism. Because I flubbed up and lost sight of Rust Jigsaw’s real self, all we can do now is wait for news from the manager of Akihabara BG.”

“The Holy Land of duels? I’ve heard the rumors. So it really does exist, huh, the underground stadium?”

“Although the amounts you bet and the fight money aren’t really any kind of underground prices.”

“If we weren’t dealing with all this, I’d want to go hang out there.” Takumu paused for a moment and then sent a voice that sounded consoling. “Whatever the results, I think you did great, Haru. Nice work. Let’s just hope now that the manager over there gets something on that mechanism soon.”

“Guess so. Thanks.”

“I brought your umbrella home, too, by the way. Okay, see you tomorrow at school.”

The connection ended, and taking a deep breath, Haruyuki pulled the now-warmed casserole out of the microwave and ate it by himself. He then cleared the table and started in on his homework in his room, but he couldn’t concentrate right away the way he usually could.

Today, he would crack Nomi’s list-blocking system; tomorrow he’d attack and they’d duel, and with Takumu, who would have mastered Incarnate, they would destroy him together. Somewhere in his heart, that was the way he had expected—no, assumed—that things would play out.

Unfortunately, that was now impossible. Leaving the situation as it stood another day meant Nomi got to spend that much more time with Chiyuri. It was too much to bear when he imagined the two of them talking, even just a single conversation.

Haruyuki shook his head several times and tried to turn his focus on nothing but the holowindow before his eyes. But even as he struggled to translate the English text, the weight pushing heavily on his heart didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Almost as if to mock his impatience, in the evening of that day, April 17, the tag team Dusk Taker and Lime Bell made their real debut in the Accelerated World. Haruyuki heard it from Takumu’s mouth the following day.

Instead of Suginami, the pair invaded the Shinjuku area, the western Tokyo dueling mecca. A tag team putting Lime Bell’s healing ability with Dusk Taker and his ultimate combo technique of flying and long-distance flame power was the very definition of invincible, and the team thoroughly decimated any and all comers.

Nomi’s tactic was entirely rational: actively use Chiyuri and her inferior attack power as bait, and then slaughter the enemies coming in to cut her down with his flames. This ruthless strategy had no drawbacks for him, since he wasn’t worried about his partner occasionally getting dragged into a ranged attack, and all the Burst Linkers facing them for the first time were turned into piles of ash.

Given that they even came up underdog-style to defeat the two top Blue Legion members who challenged them last, the Accelerated World now thundered the name Dusk Taker, much more loudly than it did at the appearance of Silver Crow six months earlier.