9

April 19.

Friday.

On lunch break that day, just one day before Kuroyukihime’s return to Tokyo, Haruyuki proceeded toward the student cafeteria, cut through the rows of long tables, and headed straight for the very back.

His objective was the lounge, a place where, on top of the unspoken rule that only eighth and ninth graders could use it, many of the tables were reserved seats for council members and the champions’ club. Haruyuki had, up to that point, not once set foot in it when Kuroyukihime was not there.

However, for now at least, he mustered up the courage to slip through the white gates and walked over to one of the round tables. The students sitting there, having lunch as they chatted pleasantly, noticed Haruyuki’s approach and lifted their faces.

As the stars of the swimming and softball teams showered him with the dubious gaze reserved for the obviously out of place, Haruyuki turned toward the lone seventh-grade student, small of stature, back still turned, and began to speak in a low voice. “Nomi. I need to talk to you. Come to the place we first spoke.”

And then he turned on his heel without waiting for a reply.

As he waited for Nomi under the gloom of the stand of trees in the courtyard, free from the watchful eyes of the social cameras, Haruyuki recalled the day he had first met the grade seven here.

The lowerclassman, cute like a girl, had declared to Haruyuki with a bright voice and a broad smile that the fight was over. And just as he said, from that moment on, the more Haruyuki struggled, the worse he made his own situation. He struck out at Nomi and was instead beaten down himself; on top of being stepped on, he had his flying ability stolen in a direct duel. Although an upset victory had been within his reach in the rematch after he learned the Incarnate System in the Unlimited Neutral Field, he was forced to even greater defeat because of Chiyuri’s unexpected appearance.

Nomi’s war even pushed into the real world, where Haruyuki was pushed up against the wall thanks to Nomi spreading the rumor that Haruyuki was the secret camera criminal. In the Accelerated World, Nomi was using Haruyuki’s wings and Chiyuri’s person to earn vast quantities of points and level up. If this kept up, the Black King, Black Lotus, most likely Nomi’s final target as Takumu had said, might even be exposed to danger.

However…

It ends here, Nomi.

He heard branches breaking under footfalls approaching him from behind, and Haruyuki slowly turned around. He stared at the innocent yet cunning smile of the lowerclassman, who appeared from the shadow of a thick oak’s trunk.

“That’s game over. Seiji Nomi—I mean, Dusk Taker.”

“…What did you say?” Smile still playing on his lips, Nomi cocked his head slightly. “Does this then mean that you’re admitting your complete defeat? Are you saying, I give up, so please don’t torment me anymore?”

“No. I mean that this game with you is finished,” Haruyuki replied in a low voice, putting every ounce of force his body had into his eyes, to meet his opponent’s teasing gaze.

Nomi’s smile gradually faded, and a faint line of displeasure dug in between his eyebrows. “Arita, you really are slow on the uptake, aren’t you? I’ll concede that you worked hard, learning a stingy little Incarnate attack and finding that firecracker thing you call an Enhanced Armament, but it should be clear by now that this served you absolutely no purpose. All you and Mayuzumi can do now is watch enviously from the sidelines. I will defeat the Black King and rule this school—no, the entire Suginami area.”

Nomi’s voice was cold, a slicing knife, and Haruyuki shook his head hard to brush the words away. “No. I won’t let you do that.” He took a step forward and announced curtly, “The reason you don’t show up on the matching list is because you have a second VR machine in that head of yours. By which I mean…an illegal brain implant chip.”

The sudden change that came over Nomi’s face confirmed the correctness of Haruyuki’s guess. Both eyes flew open before narrowing grimly. His bared teeth squeaked and several thin lines ran along the bridge of his nose. But he didn’t make a move to open his mouth to try and speak, so Haruyuki pushed further.

“If I’m wrong, then go ahead and take off your Neurolinker right now. I know the school register tag I can see won’t disappear even if you do.”

Nomi and Haruyuki both knew there was no point in him feigning ignorance and saying he had no obligation to do any such thing. If Haruyuki sent in an anonymous tip to the school authorities, Nomi would end up getting a brain scan at the hospital with a member of the school management staff as a witness. It would be completely and entirely impossible to falsify the result. Nomi would then be deemed to have been admitted to the school under false pretenses, and in addition to being expelled, he would be forced to undergo treatment to inactivate the BIC. The damage would be equivalent to or greater than what would happen to Haruyuki if he was “outed” as the secret video criminal.

Not even trying to hide his rage, Nomi glared at Haruyuki. “…Here I thought you were a pig, and the truth is you’re a rat, hmm?” he spat in a hoarse voice. “Endlessly darting about, sniffing at everything…”

“Then you should have crushed me at the start. The fact that you didn’t is your mistake.”

Nomi gradually suppressed the heat of his anger at Haruyuki’s retort, and the sneer returned to his lips. “Well, I will give you that. So? What do you plan to do? Is it your wish to fire our missiles and be destroyed together? We’ll both be expelled. I’ll be sent to the hospital and you to juvenile detention. Moreover, at some point we’ll both be attacked in the real and lose Brain Burst. Are you saying that that is the ending you’re choosing?”

“If it comes to that. I’m not afraid of that.” But clenching fists cold with sweat, Haruyuki opened his mouth to suggest the ending he had spent the whole night thinking up. “Nomi. We each hold a trump card, you with my video, me with your secret. If there is a way to resolve this other than using these cards and destroying each other in the real…it’s a duel.”

“A duel?”

“Yeah. You and I are both Burst Linkers, after all. Connect to the local net right now through your Neurolinker, not your BIC. Turn off the once-a-day limit and just keep fighting me. Until one of us admits defeat or loses all his burst points. Although I’ll tell you right from the start, I have no intention of surrendering until my last point is gone.”

And then even if I do lose, after that, it’s Taku. And then Kuroyukihime will fight you.

Nomi had to have heard these unspoken words, added on in Haruyuki’s heart.

Once more, albeit for a very brief moment, deep anger and irritation rose up onto the face of Seiji Nomi. “Duel. Burst Linker. Both terms that I despise. No, the very mentality that would seriously use those words is so detestable I can hardly stand it. But…if that is what you desire, then I suppose I have no choice.” His expression reverted to his usual faint smile as he leaned back against the oak and flipped a finger up. “But if it’s going to be like this, then I have one suggestion.”

“…Suggestion?”

“Don’t you think it’s ridiculous to fight accelerated duel after duel, dozens of times, even hundreds of times if it goes poorly, until one of us loses all his points? And assuming one of us surrenders, what kind of guarantee does that offer?”

“So what are you saying we should do?”

“Let’s finish it in one go. The ‘final battle’ you do so like,” Nomi said, gruesome grin cut into his face. “In the Unlimited Neutral Field, there’s a way to wager all the burst points of the players on a single match. Two or more duelers charge all their points into an item, and then the last player left standing gets the item and the points. So? Don’t you think this is a rather smart way of deciding things?”

Haruyuki stared hard at Nomi’s smiling face for several seconds and then shook his head slightly. “Unfortunately, Nomi, I can’t trust you that much. I’m sure this is no surprise to you or anything. In the Unlimited Neutral Field, I can’t rule out the possibility that you’ll ambush me with your friends in the place of the battle.”

Nomi spread his hands in a “what am I going to do with you?” sort of way. “I think I’m the one at risk of that! But in that case, allow me to give you two guarantees. The first is that you are welcome to bring Cyan Pile—Mayuzumi. I’ll fight you each in turn. And the second is that you can go ahead and postpone the time of the battle immediately before it is to start by however many minutes as many times as you like. That way, it would, in reality, be impossible to ambush someone.”

Haruyuki held his breath and thought quickly.

In the Unlimited Neutral Field, time passed at a thousand times faster than in the real world. So for instance, if they initially set a dive for five PM, if he postponed it by ten minutes a few seconds in advance of that, a week of time would pass inside. If he did this several times, the lapsed time would balloon, making it impossible to keep waiting and not go insane. And if you repeatedly broke away with dives in small increments, you would have to use ten burst points each time. No one but a king-class player could sustain that kind of point loss.

The talk of ambushes in the Unlimited Neutral Field made him remember the Yellow Legion’s scheme against Red King Niko during the whole Chrome Disaster thing three months earlier, but it wasn’t like they had been sitting there waiting for months, not knowing when Niko would show up. In the process of transferring the Enhanced Armament, they had cracked the real of Disaster’s true self Cherry Rook, and they had guessed at what time Niko would dive by monitoring his movements. Without means like that, setting up an ambush in the Unlimited Neutral Field was impossible—or you would think, anyway.

However, Haruyuki was well aware that his knowledge of the Accelerated World was still far from great, so of course, he didn’t give an immediate answer. “If that’s what you want to do, I can talk it over with Takumu, yeah?”

“Of course you can. Please do! Go ahead! You go and discuss it to your heart’s content.” Grinning, Nomi took a step back. “Once you make a decision, please get in touch with me at this address. I’d also like time to prepare mentally.” He flicked an anonymous mailing address at Haruyuki, then whirled around and left the courtyard. Haruyuki held his breath and stared at his receding back.

He had a bad feeling. He had assumed this would play out with him hitting Nomi with the single word BIC and then they would just jump into the duel straightaway. He felt like Nomi was trying to wrest back control by getting this time now.

After checking that Nomi had disappeared into the school building, Haruyuki leaned up against a nearby tree and uttered in neurospeak, “What do you think, Taku?”

“It’s risky,” Takumu replied immediately. He had been listening to the whole conversation with Nomi online.

Haruyuki had already told Takumu all about the BIC things he had realized the night before. They had also decided on how to finish things with Seiji Nomi, the idea that first Haruyuki, and then Takumu, would intently challenge him to duels on the local net until Nomi ran out of burst points.

Naturally, it wasn’t as though they hadn’t considered the possibility that both of them would lose all of their points going up against the level-six Dusk Taker. But if they were defeated in a normal fight—well, that was that. Once you dive into the battlefield, there is only the fight. That was precisely the thinking of their master, Kuroyukihime.

However, neither of them had anticipated Nomi’s proposal. Takumu repeated once more in a tense thought, “It’s too risky, Haru. We don’t know what could happen in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Especially when our opponent is Nomi.”

“So then we ax his proposal?”

Here, Takumu fell silent. Finally, he started in a darker tone, “But like Nomi says, even supposing he does surrender, we have no guarantees…That still leaves the possibility of him setting up a new trap someday.”

“Hey, Taku. Can you think of any way to set up an ambush in the Unlimited Neutral Field and get around the indefinite postponement of the specified time?”

“Maybe a huge number of burst points,” Takumu replied slowly, after another few seconds of silence. “A huge amount of endurance. There shouldn’t be anything other than that. The problem is whether or not Nomi has any friends who would be willing to make such an enormous sacrifice.”

This time, Haruyuki thought for a while before speaking. “Hmm. There’s a good chance he belongs to some kind of organization. The kind that’d make its members have a procedure to get a BIC implanted. That Rust Jigsaw I fought in Akihabara’s probably one of them. Neither of them have a tag on their avatar name, so I guess it’s not a Legion.”

“So like a bunch of guys who efficiently earn burst points with the brain chip and then use them in the real world? Those ‘acceleration users’ Nomi talked about before, no doubt.”

“Right. So would these guys basically be infinitely wasteful with their points and time to help Nomi out of this jam he’s in?” Biting his lip, Haruyuki soon continued. “No, I can’t believe they would be. That bit Nomi said about there being no such thing as freely given friendship is the truth for him. To put it the other way, if he did have friends like that, I’m sure Nomi…would be a better real Burst Linker.”

These words of his were without any foundation, but Takumu replied quickly with an assenting thought. “Yeah. You’re right. That’s exactly it. This is a fight between you and me, Burst Linkers, and Nomi, acceleration user. That’s the ground on which our pride stands…Yeah, that’s right…”

For a moment, the shared thought was a white light flowing through the voice call circuit.

Haruyuki nodded sharply and sent a strong thought. “Okay, then. I’ll say yes. The first set time’ll be once you and Nomi are done with practice and have gotten back home. So let’s say…eight tonight. If we postpone this a minimum of even ten times, that’s more than an hour, which should take care of the possibility of an ambush.”

“Roger.”

His shoulders relaxed at the prompt response and Haruyuki added, “And to be honest, I’m kinda glad to get a one-off fight.”

“Heh-heh. That’s ’cause you’re the overconcentrating type, Haru. I’m counting on you to finish him quickly for me.”

“But that’d suck for you after you went to all the trouble of the Incarnate training.”

They laughed together for a minute, and after a quick “See you after school” back and forth, Haruyuki ended the call.

I’m so glad I have Taku with me. He felt it deep down, and he was thankful from the bottom of his heart that he hadn’t chosen to strike the final blow when he and Cyan Pile fought for the first time six months earlier.

After school. Seven thirty PM.

He finished cleaning up the living room and had just pulled his usual frozen pizza out of the freezer to heat up when the doorbell rang. He glanced at the holowindow that popped up, confirmed that it was Takumu’s face there, and raced to the entryway. He pressed the UNLOCK button and said to the opening door, “Hey! Right on—”

Before he could finish with time, Haruyuki reeled back, mouth hanging open.

Standing behind Takumu with a stern look was another familiar face.

“Ch-Chiyu?!”

Why now, here?

Not even giving him the time to voice this question, Chiyuri, in her street clothes, murmured, “I’m coming in,” expressionlessly and stepped up into the hallway. She slid by Haruyuki and walked into the living room.

He stared dumbfounded after her before turning back to Takumu. “Wh-why?”

“I didn’t call her. She was just in the elevator with me,” Takumu muttered, also having a hard time understanding it. He exhaled a thin breath and closed the door before asking if he could come in with a tilt of his head.

Nodding repeatedly, Haruyuki went back down the hallway with Takumu.

Chiyuri, standing in the kitchen rather than the living room, lifted up the frozen pizza box he had left in the sink. “As usual, eating stuff like this,” she said with a small smile. She returned the box to the freezer and held up a bag she had brought with her. “I got Mom to make lasagna again. For the three of us.” She paused for a moment. “Don’t worry. It’s not poisoned or anything.”

The instant the joke reached his ears, a sharp pain pierced his chest squarely in the center and he twisted his face up. Why do things have to be like this between us? The thought spun around in the back of his mind. When he averted his gaze, he saw Takumu’s eyes also stiffen under his glasses.

Looking away, Chiyuri quickly pulled a heat-resistant container out of the bag and split its contents over three plates. With one plate in her left hand and two adroitly balanced in her right, she headed into the living room. “C’mon, sit down.” Smiling, she placed the plate with the slightly larger piece in front of Haruyuki and a plate with a piece about the same size as her own in front of Takumu. She took forks from the cutlery basket in the middle of the dining table and handed them to the two boys.

Compared with last week’s Chiyuri, each of these movements was dull, as if her arms were bound by some unseen rope, and Haruyuki couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

He accepted the fork and fixed his gaze on his plate. “Thanks,” he said in a small voice. “So let’s eat.”

“Yeah, let’s eat,” Takumu agreed.

At Chiyuri’s “Go ahead,” the two began to eat her mother’s special lasagna. It was delicious. It was even a cut above the one they had been treated to the previous week. However, the deliciousness just made the pain in Haruyuki’s heart all the starker. He felt like he would start crying if he stopped chewing, so Haruyuki moved fork to mouth intently, almost cradling his plate.

Within ten minutes, all three plates were empty. Chiyuri went to do the dishes and then sat back down at the table. She finally opened her mouth to break the silence at 7:50 PM. “Nomi told me to come. To the place of the final battle.”

“Wh—”

“Huh?!”

Haruyuki and Takumu spoke at the same time.

After a momentary blank space, his thoughts started spinning at high speed. “H-he did? Right, you’re already level four now. So you can go to the Unlimited Neutral Field, too.” Foolishly, Haruyuki hadn’t even considered the possibility that Chiyuri might show up, too. But he knew Nomi wouldn’t hesitate to use Lime Bell to ambush them.

“B-but…how was Nomi planning to tell you the right time?” Takumu’s question was totally natural. Haruyuki and Takumu could change the specified time at will and shake off any Burst Linkers lying in wait. Chiyuri was no exception.

Chiyuri dropped her head, as if trying to escape the two sets of eyes pointed her way. “Nomi told me,” she muttered. “He told me to meet you guys directly and say I was betraying him. To make you trust me like this and dive at the same time as you guys. He told me to heal him once the duel started.”

“…What are you…” Haruyuki clenched his teeth abruptly.

How far will that coward go?! Rage shot through his brain, while an even greater confusion bubbled up in him—what was Chiyuri’s intention in confessing all this?

As if sensing his doubt, Chiyuri continued thinly, “But I guess that’s too much, huh? After everything that’s happened, I’m not especially persuasive. So I…To tell the truth, I wanted to ask you both a favor.”

“Ask us…?”

She looked at Haruyuki and Takumu in turn, large eyes veiled with tears. “Please take me with you,” she said, enunciating each word. “I have to go. If you say no…Although if that’s what you say, there’s nothing I can do about it. In that case, I’ll just dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field right here and now and wait on the other side until you come. I’ll wait however many months, years it takes.”

“…Chiyu, you…” He squeezed the words from his choked throat. Naturally, this declaration hit him hard, but hearing the words “Unlimited Neutral Field” come so smoothly from her mouth was even more of a shock. She should still have been a total beginner; a mere week earlier, she hadn’t know the first thing about Brain Burst. The question welled up in his heart for the hundredth, thousandth time since this whole thing started.

Why, why? Chiyu, why are you doing all this?! Why are you so stuck on Brain Burst when you were pushing against it so hard before? What do you keep earning points for?!

And yes, Haruyuki couldn’t stop himself from even this thought: What if this is a trap? What if she’s betraying us a second time, and this is a strategy to get herself into the final battle and steal our points?

He honestly didn’t know if he could win this fight against Dusk Taker, even one-on-one, but adding in Lime Bell’s healing ability against him, his chances of victory essentially disappeared. Just like in the fight on Tuesday.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t manage to get a handle on what Chiyuri was actually up to.

Breaking the heavy silence was Takumu’s quiet voice. “Okay, Chi. Come with us.”

“T-Taku…”

Takumu turned toward Haruyuki and smiled gently. “Haru. Six months ago, you saved me in that first fight in the hospital. I’m sure you had your doubts. There was a very real possibility that I was just saying whatever to stay alive, and once the fight was over, I’d immediately try to hunt Black Lotus, still in her coma. But…you forgave me. No, you trusted me. I’ll never, ever forget that…which is why…” He took a deep breath, throat trembling, and declared resolutely, “I trust Chi. I hate it that no matter how much I think about it, I can’t figure out her real motives…but whatever happens because of what she does, I’ll accept it.”

In the once-again-silent room, Haruyuki watched Chiyuri’s lips move soundlessly. It was just the slight movement of a tremor, but words did in fact reach his ears.

Thank you, Taku.

Haruyuki squeezed his eyes shut tightly. On the screen of his eyelids, the tears she had shown him in her room the day before came back to life.

I move of my own free will.

That’s what she had said as tears poured down her face. In which case, the little stuff didn’t matter. It was just like Takumu said: Either he trusted her or he didn’t. That was the only issue. And the answer was obvious. He had already decided that years before, back when Chiyuri and Haruyuki didn’t really talk for real.

“Got it.” Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down. “We go. The three of us.”

As the clock struck eight, Haruyuki sent the first text mail to Nomi. Dive time 8:05 PM. The place: in front of Koenji Station in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

Of course, both of these would be successively changed going forward. He would send the new instructions mere seconds before the specified time, so even supposing Nomi did have someone lying in wait, it would be impossible for him to communicate the change. The sole risk was that Nomi had his ambush personnel with him in the real, like Haruyuki and his friends, so that they could dive at the same time, but he couldn’t believe that Nomi had any friends he trusted that much. To remove this possibility as well, they had considered meeting Nomi on this side as well and then diving, but this proposal was abandoned with the reasoning that leaving their unconscious bodies alone in front of Nomi was even riskier.

Haruyuki kept sending mail after mail, changing the time and place at irregular intervals. The tension he felt while on standby was uncomfortable, like being left for an extensive period in the dentist’s waiting room. However, it was probably nothing compared to the irritation Nomi must have been feeling, so he endured it. Nomi couldn’t know exactly how many minutes, how many times they planned to drag this thing out.

9:12 PM.

After postponing the fight a full fifteen times or more, Haruyuki finally said, “Okay. We dive in one minute.”

“Roger,” Takumu replied, and Chiyuri nodded.

A single fight with their cumulative points on the line. No matter how drawn out it got, it wouldn’t take more than an hour. In other words, in real time, everything would be over in a mere 3.6 seconds.

Kuroyukihime. Haruyuki’s heart called out to her in distant Okinawa. If I lose, you’ll probably be super angry and pretty sad, too. But I know you’ll understand in the end. It’s exactly because I’m trying to be your knight that I have to do this.

Five seconds before 9:13.

Haruyuki hit the SEND button on the final mail.

The text: “Place: Umesato Junior High School grounds. Time: Now.”

“Here we go!!” Haruyuki shouted, and then the three of them called out the command with one voice.

“Unlimited Burst!!”