10

Night.

An enormous pale disc glittered and glimmered in the black sky. The surface of the earth, the buildings, everything was white as though the color had been drained out. The world wasn’t colorless, but more like the shade of dried bone. Square houses cast neat shadows on the broad road. In the distance, the Shinjuku center, transformed into chalk towers carving out spirals, pierced the night sky and soared upward.

“A Moonlight stage?” Takumu—Cyan Pile murmured after looking around at the virtual world of western Tokyo.

Haruyuki quickly listed the characteristics from his memory. “It’s bright, but you basically can’t see anything in the shadows. Noise carries from far away. Few Enemies. There are no trap-type terrain effects.”

“Surprise attacks from a hiding place in open spaces are basically impossible. We were right to choose the school.” After nodding at one another, they glanced behind them.

In the empty white space that had originally been the Arita living room stood a quiet Lime Bell, shining a vivid emerald green in the light of the moon. She didn’t look any different from when he’d seen her on Tuesday. But in a mere two days, she had been in an incredible number of duels and won all of them, meaning that she had already reached level four, just like Haruyuki and Takumu. They had been at level four for a while, though, so there was probably still a fair gap in the total number of points they had earned, given that Haruyuki and Takumu were on the verge of reaching level five and Chiyuri had barely leveled up to four, but at the very least, their potential should have been the same.

During the short period of this dizzying climb, Chiyuri, as Nomi’s healer/bait, had no doubt been exposed to all kinds of attacks from countless Burst Linkers. Haruyuki keenly understood just how difficult and painful that experience must have been.

But she came to stand in front of them in a movement that revealed no exhaustion whatsoever. “Let’s go,” she said briefly. And then without hesitation, she tossed herself from the terrace, which was the equivalent of the twenty-third floor of the former condo. She fluttered down to the ground using the terraces below and the decorative objects as footholds, all without a trace of a newbie’s awkwardness.

Haruyuki and Takumu looked at each other again, and after unconsciously grinning wryly, they flew down the same way. The three avoided the route they usually took to school and trotted down a back road. As they kept an eye out, the two boys smashed objects as they went along to build up their special-attack gauges.

They didn’t enter the school from the front but first came out on the roof of the family restaurant on the other side of Oume Kaido and checked out the location of the final battle from the shadows.

Umesato Junior High School had been transformed into something like a medieval European palace. In what was perhaps a gothic style, enormous columns were lined up along the front, and several sculptures of angels and demons jutted out from the walls.

Those can’t all be duel avatars, can they? He rubbed his eyes and, after checking that they were all, in fact, stone, he turned to the school once again.

The expansive grounds had become a garden covered by thin tiles in complex patterns. There was not a single object on the field, just the long, thin shadows cast by the lance-like towers—formerly the main pillars of the baseball fence.

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s hiding here,” Haruyuki murmured, and Takumu nodded.

“Yeah. But Nomi’s not here, either…Maybe he was a half second behind us on the dive.”

“If he doesn’t come in five minutes, we’ll port out for a bit through Koenji Station…Wait, hold up a sec.” The faint sound of the wind reached Haruyuki’s ears. The stage was completely windless, so something was moving in the sky. A flying Enemy—or a flying duel avatar. Whirling his head up toward the southwestern sky, Haruyuki froze solid the instant he saw it.

A shadow approached within the night sky aglitter with tiny stars, and then shined white in the moonlight. Slim body. Claws on both hands. And stretching out from his back: devil wings.

Dusk Taker.

“No…mi…,” he groaned unconsciously, and, as if drawn by that voice, the avatar began its descent.

Arms crossed, drawing an elegant spiral in the air, he came down in the center of the schoolyard, an almost-silent landing. Just seeing this, Haruyuki knew that Nomi had already completely mastered the flight ability.

The avatar with the marauding attribute slowly folded his wings and stopped moving. Once again, the world was filled with silence.

Haruyuki’s senses couldn’t pick up any changes. There were no movements of secret approach, no footfalls crawling up from his blind spot, nothing.

After waiting a full minute and more, Haruyuki whispered, “Let’s go.”

Next to him, Takumu nodded. They stood up at the same time and jumped down onto the street. Dusk Taker jerked his head up at the sound of their feet.

Staring over at him, Haruyuki and his friends entered the Umesato campus through the school gates and headed for the schoolyard, going around the edge of the school. The three avatars’ feet clacked against the hard tile. The light of the moon carved sharp shadows behind them.

Rather than entering the courtyard, Chiyuri walked along the southern wall of the school and stood quietly in the shadows. Haruyuki and Takumu moved straight ahead toward the wide-open space of the center, stopping when they were about twenty meters from Dusk Taker. Haruyuki silently shot his gaze toward him.

After a few seconds of this, Nomi uncrossed the arms folded in front of his chest and spread them lightly to the sides. “I suppose I am the one who said it was fine to postpone as many times as you wanted!” Tinged with a metallic effect, the boy’s voice echoed lightly in the pale world. “But, honestly, I didn’t expect you to drag it out like that, Arita! I’m not sure if I should call you cautious or suspicious.”

“By now I’ve learned that with you as my opponent, I can never be too suspicious.”

To Haruyuki’s retort, Nomi gave a short chuckle before thrusting his right hand out. Pinched between the tips of his fingers was a single card. It resembled the one the Yellow King had used before to play a video of the past, but this one was red like blood. Haruyuki had heard that the majority of special items sold in the Unlimited Neutral Field Shop were card-shaped.

Nomi waved the card at Haruyuki and Takumu. “The name of this card is Sudden Death Duel. It’s fairly expensive, but I’ll make it my treat.” He laughed once again. “First, I’ll charge it with all the points I have. The remaining two fighter slots are set to team, so please, both of you wager your points as well. At the point when my HP gauge becomes zero, if you are both still alive, all the charged points will be evenly split between the two of you. If there’s only one of you, then he gets them all. And at the point when I defeat both of you, I get the points.”

“In other words, if the both of us survive, there’s no need for us to fight each other, right?”

“Precisely. Call it a little forethought on my part. The key critical factor here is…” Nomi brandished the card once more and said, “The battle won’t stop until someone dies. And the person who dies will lose Brain Burst. No holds barred, hmm? Oh, and just so you know. If you leave through a portal, it will be treated as defeat at that moment. You’ll be faced with a forced uninstall the moment you return to reality.”

“Got it.” Nodding, Haruyuki looked at Takumu. Cyan Pile also jerked his head up and down, eyes shining fiercely beneath the slits lined up on his mask. “Okay, guess that’s fine.”

At Haruyuki’s voice, Nomi nodded slowly and touched the card with the fingertips of his left hand. He performed several operations and the card gleamed a brief, vivid bright red. Then he tossed it at Takumu, who caught it, touching it as he did, and the card shone once again. Takumu tossed it to Haruyuki, and he pinched it in the fingers of his right hand. Taking a deep breath, he clicked with his left and touched the CHARGE button in the center of the holowindow that popped up.

After an explanation of the sudden-death rules scrolled past in a blunt font, a YES/NO confirmation dialog popped up. YES.

When the normally extremely curt Brain Burst system asked, ARE YOU SURE?, Haruyuki truly understood the fact that he was on the brink of death. Despite the fact that he was technically cut off from his real flesh-and-blood body, a chill ran up his spine. At the same time as his limbs went numb, a virtual adrenaline pumped into his veins.

However, of course: YES.

The card flashed a remarkably dazzling red, pulled away from Haruyuki’s hand, and rose up slightly in the sky. Around it, the digital numbers of a countdown slowly rolled down.

If news of this final battle had made it into the Accelerated World, they would’ve no doubt been instantly surrounded by the largest Gallery ever assembled. Although it had been six months since Haruyuki became a Burst Linker, before now, he had never even heard of a sudden-death battle with all your points on the line.

No. That wasn’t right. He had heard of something like it.

Black Lotus, the Black King and a master of the sword, who Haruyuki loved and respected more than anyone. Because of a special rule that applied only to level-nine Burst Linkers, she carried the risk of sudden death with her into every fight. For instance, in the Territories every weekend: If another king were to show up, meticulously prepared, in the worst case she would lose that duel, and she would immediately lose Brain Burst forever.

Kuroyukihime. You’ve been living all this time under this heavy cloud, he murmured in his heart, and a second later, the countdown reached zero.

Flaming letters announced the start of the duel.

Dusk Taker threw out the talons of both hands.

Haruyuki crouched and readied his sword hands around him.

But Nomi’s wings stayed folded up, and he didn’t seem to be generating the purple pulsation. Maybe he wanted a ground fight with no Incarnate first?

Bring it! Haruyuki cried in his head and kicked off the ground. A fierce dash would cover the twenty meters between them at once. The figure of his enemy rapidly grew larger before his eyes. He cut across the shadows of the poles stretching out over the white schoolyard. One, two—

It happened when he stepped on the third pole.

Something sprang up, spurting forth from the slim shadow not more than ten centimeters wide: A darkness that shouldn’t have been able to hide anything closed in on Haruyuki from both sides. Squares, sides about a meter long: Two matte jet-black panels shot up as if on a spring mechanism the instant Haruyuki stepped on the pole’s shadow and boxed him in with terrifying force. Even with Silver Crow’s speed, he couldn’t avoid them. It was all he could do to stick out his hands and try to stop their advance.

Clang! The metallic impact echoed in the night, and sparks flew from the joints of his arms. A slice was taken from his HP gauge, the only one he could see.

“Ngh!” he involuntarily cried out at the sharp pain. Although the panels were extremely thin, no more than a few millimeters thick, they exerted an incredible pressure, like he was being clamped by an enormous vise. Very much unable to spread his arms out, he changed the orientation of his hands and intently fought back with his elbows and the backs of his hands. But the panels instantly imprisoned Haruyuki in a gap of about fifty centimeters before finally stopping.

Listening to the creaking of his own avatar, Haruyuki forced himself to shake off his astonishment and think. There are no traps in a Moonlight stage. So does that mean Dusk Taker has some special attack I didn’t know about?! No, if that were it, there would definitely have been some kind of motion or shout when he activated it. And if he had this kind of powerful attack, he would’ve used it the last time we fought. In which case—

The jet-black panels were not Nomi’s. And, of course, they weren’t Lime Bell’s. Which meant there was someone else on this battlefield.

No, impossible. There was no way anyone could ambush this fight after they had postponed it so close to the start so many times. His racing brain had reached this conclusion when he sensed a ghostly presence and his conclusion was immediately overturned.

The northern edge of the white schoolyard was sunken into the black shadow created by the four-story school building. He could see the tiny figure of Lime Bell still crouched against the wall there. Wordlessly, Haruyuki and Takumu behind him stared at the silent appearance of the fifth avatar far ahead of her, from the very front edge of the school’s shadow.

Bizarre.

That was the only word to describe it. Haruyuki had never before seen a more bizarre-looking duel avatar in the Accelerated World.

The entire body was made of thin panels lined up perpendicularly, almost as if someone had built up layer upon layer of square sheets of paper to form the shapes of body parts. There was a gap of about a centimeter between each panel, so that although a clear silhouette was obvious from the side, from the front, the avatar looked like nothing more than an arrangement of thin vertical lines. The dozens of panels were a lusterless black, as though they had all been painted with ink.

But more than the avatar’s shape, the color had the larger impact on Haruyuki. The layered avatar was clearly and obviously a perfect black. It had none of the hints of silver, like Chrome Disaster, or purple, like Dusk Taker, or the other blackish avatars he had seen. This black was complete, absorbing all wavelengths of light, rejecting all color.

“…Who are you…?” Haruyuki murmured hoarsely.

However, the avatar said nothing in reply, instead tilting its square head and returning Haruyuki’s stare from behind several openings. Instantly, the pressure from the panels pinching his body increased. Silver Crow’s armor squealed in a deeply unpleasant way.

Here, Haruyuki finally noticed that the layered avatar had no right arm. In its place, a hazy gray light shimmered around the shoulder. He didn’t understand the logic behind it, but it was clear from the color and shape that that right arm was made up of the two panels currently confining him.

One other thing was also clear.

This black avatar was the ambush Nomi had prepared. The ambush Haruyuki and Takumu had examined and carefully eliminated every single possibility of.

“…Why…? How…? There should have been no way to know the time…” The groan from behind was Takumu, stunned.

Even at this, the layered avatar maintained its silence.

It was Dusk Taker, a few meters in front of Haruyuki, who began chuckling instead.

Dropping from his fighting stance, the dusk-colored avatar sneered once more. “Heh-heh! Honestly. You all do let me have so much fun with you. I like it, this shocked look of yours. This is a show I’d even pay to see. Which reminds me, didn’t you say something earlier? That you’d learned you could never be too suspicious? Unfortunately, you don’t appear to have studied hard enough, hmm? Hah-hah, ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

Laughter barking loudly, he threw both hands out. “And you’re both about to lose all of your points, so there’s no real point in doing anything for you now. Although, as a farewell gift, I suppose I could clear a few things up for you. I obviously couldn’t predict the time you would pick, and this one over there wouldn’t exactly wait months on this side for us to show up. Of course.”

He moved the talons of his right hand farther and tapped the lens-shaped visor of his own head. “You already know that we have brain implant chips. The BIC connects growth terminals to the sensory area of the brain for a bioelectronic interface. Depending on the programming, it’s possible to reach the deepest parts of the brain.”

“D-deepest parts?” Haruyuki murmured, and Nomi nodded exaggeratedly.

“Yes. Naturally, it’s very dangerous. I myself haven’t gone that far. But this person here, despite appearances, is relatively daring. The terminals stretch all the way to his brain’s mental clock control area.”

Mental clock.

These words were the supertechnological foundation used to realize the acceleration of Haruyuki and the other Burst Linkers. The Brain Burst program accelerated thought by increasing the user’s base clock, which was based on a standard of the user’s heart rate, a thousand times within the brain. As long as you were diving in the Normal Duel Field or in the Unlimited Neutral Field, the amplification was fixed and could not be manipulated in any way.

In other words, with Haruyuki’s and Takumu’s postponement of the time of the final battle by more than an hour, nearly two months of subjective time had passed in this world. Nomi didn’t have any friends who would patiently wait all that time to help him with an ambush. Or he shouldn’t have. And yet.

“I’ll say it again. He has been on a dive in this Unlimited Neutral Field since eight o’clock in the real world. However, he definitely hasn’t been sitting around waiting inside for a few months. Do you understand? By inactivating the mental clock control area of his brain with the BIC, he can stop the acceleration of his thoughts at will. He is, you see, the sole deceleration user in the Accelerated World!”

“…De…celeration…”

Haruyuki couldn’t tell if the voice came from his own throat or if it was Takumu’s. He was speechless.

“…Really now.” A new voice at last reached his ears, the gentle voice of an older boy, somehow seeming warm even through the electronic effect peculiar to the duel avatar. It sounded a lot like that of the young, bespectacled man who had been the only teacher in Haruyuki’s elementary school days who he had ever liked.

With Haruyuki restrained by the terrible pressure, the layered avatar spoke in a soft voice, without a hint of tension. “Look, Taker. I can’t help but think that all this chatting and running about is what got you into a sudden-death situation in the first place.”

“Ha-ha! I guess we differ in opinion there. It’s simply that you think silence is a weapon, and I think eloquence is. Say, what do you think? Their stunned faces? Don’t they look like our technological strength has already robbed them of the will to fight?”

“I don’t know about that. The little one there is really trying for some reason. He’s hard, and I can’t crush him any further.”

“Oooh, that’s a metal color for you. Even a weak one.”

“Which is to say…” The layered avatar signaled the chuckling Nomi with a finger on his left hand. “I’ve got my hands full holding him. It’d be a big help if you’d hurry up and take care of the big kid behind him.”

“Understood, understood. I don’t intend to have you work for any more than the remuneration I’ve already provided. Avatar like that, I’ll be done in three minutes—no, thirty seconds.”

Nomi’s contemptuous words finally reignited the fire in Haruyuki’s heart.

Avatar like that? You, who’s never won an honest fight against Taku! You’re calling him an “avatar like that”?! Gritting his teeth, Haruyuki let his eyes race momentarily over the panels at his sides. This is no time to let these flimsy plates hold me forever. There’re two enemies and there’re two of us. I’ll leave Nomi to Taku, and I’ll…take down this guy!

Haruyuki focused all his awareness, including these thoughts, in one spot between his eyebrows. A metallic high frequency came out of nowhere, and Silver Crow’s body began to shake. He felt his consciousness connecting with the imagination circuits hidden within the Brain Burst program.

For this entire time, that gray aura had been coiled about the right shoulder of the layered avatar restraining Haruyuki. Niko had said that a continuous light-emitting phenomenon, i.e., Overlay, was proof that the Incarnate System was being used. In other words, these panels were the avatar’s Incarnate attack. In which case, he would also fight, digging up every bit of strength he had.

Silver Crow’s sharp fingertips began to glow with a white light. This soon moved up from his wrist to cover his arm to the elbow in a thin layer of light. Haruyuki took a deep breath and shouted the Incarnate attack name he had so recently come up with.

“Laser…Sword!!”

And then he crossed both arms and plunged the tip of his right hand into the left panel and the tip of his left hand into the right. With a high-pitched screech, the lengthening light swords crashed into the jet-black panels, sending dazzling sparks flying. The places where his swords had bitten in turned red hot immediately, as if bathed in the fire of a plasma arc. This glow spread out over the surface of the thin panel in the blink of an eye and shook them violently.

I’ll rip them apart!! he cried in his heart, and focused in on that image. At that moment.

“Whoops. Now, this, this is an issue.” He heard the gentle voice. Followed by, “Static Pressure.”

An attack name call.

Abruptly, the two panels rumbled.

Previously mere millimeters thick, the panels grew wider before his eyes. Five centimeters, then ten centimeters, until at some point, they were more appropriately referred to as lumps rather than panels. The two massive rectangular solids, black as if they had been cut out of the night itself, engulfed Haruyuki in a pressure far greater than what it had been.

“Hngh!” Groaning, he pushed his own will to the limits and fought back with his light swords. But although he had been on the verge of melting the squares, the instant they turned from panels to lumps, the red-hot areas were halved.

The gray aura wafting around the shoulder of the layered avatar grew denser. Haruyuki was more than sure now that this attack wasn’t a system-regulated special attack but rather an Incarnate attack brought about by the enemy avatar’s image.

Through the conflict of their imagination output, Haruyuki felt like he could touch what was unfolding within the layered avatar.

Darkness.

Not the starving emptiness that threatened to devour everything like Nomi’s Incarnate. What existed inside him rejected all interference and had no energy; thus, it gave none and it took none. No, it wasn’t even an active refusal. It was isolation. It was an absolute alienation, a state that seemed impossible for a human heart.

The instant he felt this, Haruyuki reflexively feared their two wills touching. The light swords of his hands weakened momentarily and flickered. That was enough. The two impossibly heavy and hard objects ate in at his shoulders, rendering him completely immobile.

“Hey, you.” Once again, he heard the voice of the layered avatar. “As a favor, maybe you could stay quiet like that. I was only hired to keep you from moving temporarily. I’m not interested in fighting you.”

What…So it’s all about you?! he shouted back sharply in his heart, and his light swords surged back to life. But it took everything he had just to marginally ease the intense pressure of the black lumps; he didn’t get anywhere close to pushing them away.

Totally bound and unable to move, Haruyuki watched the other two duel avatars in the fight walking slowly toward each other.

From the west: Dusk Taker, arms too long for his small physique dangling at his sides.

From the east: Cyan Pile, the tip of his Pile Driver right arm glittering sharply.

They stood in the middle of the white schoolyard and faced each other. The crackle of impending battle abruptly flooded the field, and the air grew thicker. Trembling with a prickly tension, Haruyuki could not speak, nor even pray.

“Ooh,” Nomi said abruptly, flapping both hands at the wrists. “It seems you came prepared in your own way. Well, maybe I’ll get to have a little fun, then.”

He lifted both hands and brought his fingertips together in front of his chest. The whine of vibration began to hum through the air, and a fluctuating purple light jetted out into space. It was Nomi’s Incarnate attack, what Haruyuki and Takumu called the Nihilistic Fluctuation. Haruyuki thought he would quickly take to the sky and attack with his long-distance flame power, but Nomi apparently intended to fight on the ground, perhaps to show his disdain for Cyan Pile.

“Does that technique have a name?” Takumu asked, sounding relaxed.

“Haa!” Nomi responded with a laugh like a long sigh. “I do not give names to my techniques! I’m told that, without a name, it takes a moment longer to activate, but I’ll have no part of that sort of gamer business! And, really…” He threw his arms out to the sides. The pulsing light left hazy lines lingering in space. “Is there any point in asking something like that? When you’re about to lose Brain Burst?”

“Of course there is. I at least want to remember the opponent for whom I performed last rites,” Takumu returned coolly, readying the Enhanced Armament of his right arm sideways across his chest.

Haruyuki knew that under the guidance of Red King Niko, Takumu had spent a week training his Incarnate. However, he hadn’t gone so far as to ask what kind of attack it was or if it had even reached the level where it could be used in a real fight. Pinched between the two lumps, Haruyuki’s avatar squealed, but that couldn’t stop him from staring intently at Takumu.

Cyan Pile lifted his left arm and moved in a way Haruyuki could not have predicted. With the five fingers of his left hand, he tightly clasped the sharp tip of the stake peeking out of his Enhanced Armament.

Taku, what the—?! Haruyuki opened his eyes wide.

That spike—Takumu’s wounded psyche—was born from the memories of the cruel bullying he had been subjected to at his kendo lessons when he was in elementary school. It was the wooden shinai that had been stabbed at his own throat time after time after time, and also a lethal weapon to stab the throats of those who had tortured him.

Why would he grab the tip of it himself?

Takumu answered Haruyuki’s question with action.

“Cyan Blade!!”

Ga-shk! After an attack call like thunder, the spike was ejected. Haruyuki half expected the tip to blow Takumu’s hand away, but what broke into pieces and flew off was the launcher, the Pile Driver of his right arm itself. Still gripped in his left hand, the spike became a pale light and remained after the Driver was gone. Takumu drew it above his head in a large half circle, and then slapped his liberated right hand into that rod of light before bringing it down with a snap in front of him.

The light scattered, and appearing from within it was a close-range cutting weapon with a firm and elegant construction.

A sword.

A meter and a half long, the single edge of the katana was a perfect straight sword, with a lone deep blue line running along the peak side. The blade was colored a light blue, and the entire thing was enveloped in a faint phosphorescence of the same shade.

With this beautiful weapon readied before him, Cyan Pile became, in line with the color of his armor, nothing other than a complete close-range duel avatar. So complete, he was more swordsman than avatar.

…Taku, Haruyuki whispered in a voice that was not a voice.

Perhaps hearing his thought, Takumu looked at him momentarily and nodded. Facing forward once again, he slid his right foot forward. With this motion, the move of a skilled kendo player, he readied his sword below chest level. From his feet, an even more intense air of battle-readiness surged up from his feet, shaking the aura surrounding Nomi’s hands.

“I see,” Nomi murmured. He sounded unfazed as he took in this new development, and his contemptuous laugh soon followed. “Heh-heh, I see now. You were really torn up at losing the match to me after all, hmm? So you materialized this shoddy little sword. But, well, if it’s a sword fight you want, I suppose it can’t be helped. I’ll play along with you for a little while.”

And then Nomi also grabbed at something with both hands and snapped into the standard chudan midlevel ready-posture.

Haruyuki watched, half understanding, half stunned, as the purple fluctuation slithered out and took on the form of a long sword. Nomi had changed the fluctuation’s previous long talon shape. Haruyuki supposed if your Incarnate was a close-range weapon, you could change it into a variety of forms, depending on the image.

Although outwardly, they were duel avatars, it was two swordsmen who faced each other, in exactly the same ready positions they had taken in the final match of the kendo team tournament the previous week. Here, however, there was no judge. There was also no defensive gear. And at stake were their lives as Burst Linkers.

The tips of both players’ toes slid forward, and they began to close the distance between them. Midway between the tips of their two swords, white sparks actually bounced thinly and burned the air. The battle had already started. Takumu and Nomi were fighting each other in a war to overwrite the world with the stronger imagination.

Taku, believe in yourself!! Haruyuki shouted in his heart.

“Sehyaaaaa!!”

“Sheeeeeh!!”

The two kiai battle cries rang out in the moonlit night of the battlefield, and both avatars kicked at the ground at the same time. Tracing out vivid blue and purple trajectories, the two swords slammed into each other.

Skreeeenk! The sound of the impact was fierce. Takumu’s will, materialized as the cutting power that was the essential nature of the sword, bounced back from Nomi’s will, which tried to erase all things. The two swords violently repelled each other and their owners swung them downward simultaneously. Once again, thunder and sparks. And then again.

Here, the two avatars put some distance between them and faced each other once more in the chudan stance.

A teasing voice slipped out from beneath Dusk Taker’s mask. “My goodness, this is a surprise. For a hasty stopgap, you do fairly well with it, hmm?”

“Naturally. In a fair kendo match, I am stronger than you, after all.”

Nomi greeted Takumu’s retort with a throaty laugh. “I wonder about that, Mayuzumi. Do you think I hadn’t noticed? No matter how you try to hide it, it’s blindingly obvious! You…have a fatal weakness!”

As he shouted, Nomi stepped sharply in. The sword he gripped with both hands stretched out even farther. Adding his own thrust to the extended blade, Dusk Taker released a savage lunge at Cyan Pile’s throat. “Sheeeeeh!!”

Takumu’s arms sprang up in a convulsion to protect his throat with the blade of the blue sword. But in that instant, Nomi’s sword bent like a fencing foil and the lunge changed its aim.

Vzzzm! The tip of the purple sword cut into Cyan Pile’s defenseless right arm with an earsplitting noise. Nomi followed through, pushing the sword ahead of him. As if chasing him, a single line of pale sparks arced out from Takumu’s wound.

“Hngh!” Groaning, Takumu immediately pulled himself back up and went after Nomi. Kote, kote, men: He threw a succession of barely visible blows at Nomi’s forearms and mask. But the purple sword writhed like a living creature to repel each attack.

“Come now, shouldn’t you be protecting your neck?” Once again, Nomi thrust his howling blade forward. Taking advantage of the very tiny window when Takumu stiffened, this time, the sword ripped into his left side.

Come on, Taku!! Haruyuki cried in his heart as he resisted the black vise with all his might.

Takumu’s psychic wound. The memory of the bullying he had endured in his kendo class when he was in elementary school. It had been humiliating to have his arms pinned down, to be used as a practice dummy for lunges, but more than humiliating, it had been incredibly terrifying.

But Takumu didn’t quit kendo. He said it was because he didn’t even have the willpower to quit, but that couldn’t have been it. He was able to keep going because he loved kendo. His love was greater than his fear. That feeling…

Believe in it, Taku!!

There was no way he could hear Haruyuki. But Takumu righted himself as he started to stagger and yanked upward the sword in both hands. Past the chudan position, past the height of his neck, far above his head. An aura bluer than the moonlight enveloped the sword—held ready in something beyond the high jodan position—along with Cyan Pile’s arms, up to his shoulders.

Nomi glared down at Takumu, taking in this fixed position, the Overlay of his will shimmering. “Quite the transparent bluff, isn’t it? Oh, all right, if you’re that interested in having a giant hole cut out of your windpipe…” Purplish-black light cascaded from Nomi’s sword and arms. “I’ll pierce it right through for you, just as you wish!”

Dusk Taker’s charge was so fast that Haruyuki’s eyes almost lost him. Moving ahead in a blur, he launched a savage lunge squarely at Takumu’s throat. No feints this time.

Takumu didn’t dodge or guard. Instead, he stepped forward. The approaching sword tip, and the force of the special attack latent within it, hit him hard in his thick left shoulder, gouging a deep hole from his armor. Narrow trails of pale sparks gushed out.

“Ngh!” A quiet voice slipped out from under the mask, withstanding the pain. But this was immediately followed by a kiai battle cry that shook the air.

“Hnnyaaaaah!!” He swung the Cyan Blade straight down.

Nomi’s reaction was, of course, to jump to the right, but, unable to avoid the blow, he took the sword tip on the left side of his chest. Although the cut was fairly shallow, reddish-purple sparks still bounced and dazzled.

“Tch!” Nomi clicked his tongue as he tried to put some distance between them, and Takumu rained another blow down on him. The purple sword barely intercepted the blue blade just as it was about to make contact with Nomi’s mask.

The two moved, swords locked, pushing against each other. Sparks jetted from where their blades met, brightly illuminating their masks.

The equilibrium was momentary. Cyan Pile had the larger physique and greater physical strength, and he pushed his blade harder and harder. The outcome was not dependent on the Incarnate System. This was a simple power imbalance between a close-range type and one who mixed both close and long.

Finally, Dusk Taker’s knee crunched into the ground. His blade slipped, and Takumu’s Cyan Blade drew in on Nomi’s left shoulder. Thin cracks caused by the enormous pressure raced through the white tiles covering the schoolyard. The two masks were so close, they were practically touching.

Abruptly, a certain foreboding shivered through the back of Haruyuki’s brain.

Taku! Run!

An instant before he could shout these words, Nomi cried sharply, “Demonic Commandeer!!”

Zrrt! A concentrated darkness came swirling from Dusk Taker’s lens-shaped visor, hit Cyan Pile’s mask, and penetrated it, shuddering almost like some kind of animal. The blue avatar reeled and stopped.

Demonic Commandeer.

The sole fixed special attack Dusk Taker had. Using up the entire gauge when activated, the effect was to steal one of the target duel avatar’s abilities, special attacks, or Enhanced Armament. Nomi let the battle unfold into a close-range fight without using the wings as a trap.

Cyan Pile didn’t have any systematic abilities. And of his three special attacks, two of them basically came entirely from the Enhanced Armament. Which meant if he got hit with Demonic Commandeer, there was a 75 percent chance that the Pile Driver would be taken. If that happened, the Cyan Blade, the transformation of the spike through his will, would disappear.

The instant of stillness that blanketed the field felt like an eternity to Haruyuki.

The darkness that should have flowed back out from Cyan Pile’s mask and returned to Dusk Taker—

Didn’t.

Instead…

“Aaaaah!” With a roar, Takumu brought the sword he gripped with both hands down in a straight line.

Nomi’s left arm was severed below the shoulder, and the undulating purple light scattered into the night. The avatar was thrown to the ground, bounced violently, and tumbled nearly ten meters backward.

Of course, he was quick to get back on his feet and ready his sword of nothingness with his right hand alone. However, in perhaps a sign that he was shaken, the tip of that blade shook very slightly.

“You’re too greedy,” Cyan Pile said, brilliantly shining blue sword readied straight ahead of him. “Way, way too greedy.”

Haruyuki didn’t get what he meant right away. Takumu probably wasn’t intending to explain himself, though, as he continued quietly.

“I’ve always thought it was weird. That you didn’t take Lime Bell’s healing ability, I mean. If you had, armed with flight, firepower, and healing, you’d have been the end all and be all, beyond even the kings. But you didn’t because…” His eyes glittered keenly beneath the slits as he declared, “Insufficient capacity. A special attack as ridiculously powerful as stealing other people’s abilities, there’s no way it wouldn’t be restricted somehow. There’s an upper limit to the total abilities, the total potential you can steal and keep with your Demonic Commandeer. Which is why you wouldn’t have enough room to steal both of the super-rare abilities of flight and healing, even if you deleted all your other powers. Isn’t that right?”

Dusk Taker pressed his right hand over the cross-section of his severed left arm and remained silent. He was no doubt suffering fierce pain, double what players felt in the Normal Duel Field. Was he unable to move? Or maybe he was so angry, he had forgotten the pain?

Takumu carefully readied his sword and slowly closed the distance between them. His quiet voice once again flowed across the field.

“The person who guided me in the Incarnate said the majority of Cyan Pile’s potential is taken up by this Pile Driver. I’m sure you figured you had enough empty space right now to be able to take something like my Enhanced Armament. Unfortunately for you, you figured wrong.”

“Heh-heh-heh, I see now.” Dusk Taker finally uttered his usual contemptuous laugh, but perhaps reflecting his feelings, his voice was tinged with a dark, distorted effect. “I see. I know I said this before, but that flimsy stick of yours must have been made with some quite painful memories, hmm? A metaphor for the shinai maybe? Did something bad happen to you on the kendo team, hmm? Perhaps you, so cool and handsome, were subjected to ugly bullying? Ha-ha! Ridiculous! You’re not the little pig over there or something!!”

Taku, this chatter’s a trap! Don’t listen to him! Haruyuki cried soundlessly, fighting desperately against the black vise mercilessly crushing him.

Perhaps because of Takumu’s own surging anger, the light housed in his blade wavered slightly. But he quickly regained control and replied calmly, “My memories are really no big deal. Nothing compared to the wounds you produced that avatar with. You’re a marauder because there’s nothing left inside of you. Because you’ve had everything taken from you, and you’re nothing but an empty hole. You must’ve realized it by now. You can steal other people’s powers—no, other people’s hope, their friendship, their love, but those things will never truly be yours, not in any real sense.”

Silence once again.

Bathed in the blue moonlight, the avatar the color of darkness hung his head. Finally, he staggered to his feet feebly. Still clutching his left shoulder, he slowly brought his face up. His whole body trembled and shivered violently.

“Fu-hu-hu.” A choked laugh slipped out from the spherical visor. “Hu-hu, heh-heh-heh…Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

Tossing his head back, Dusk Taker laughed loudly and heartily. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!! Nothing?! Empty?! Ha-ha-ha! That’s…Well, that’s him!!”

He laughed again for a moment before he started talking, the words bursting out of him. “You two are so clever, you must have had it figured out from the yearbook. My ‘guardian’ is my own brother, three years older than me. He’s the real marauder. With his huge body and his violence, he took my candy and toys when I was little, and then when I got a little older, he took my allowance and my New Year’s money. In the end, he even took the girl who was my only friend. He really was the perfect marauder. Heh-heh-heh.”

He shook his head two, three times, laughing in a sort of amazement. The gloomy monologue continued.

“The first thing he ever gave me was, of course, Brain Burst. Foolishly, I was delighted, even moved. Because no sooner had the first lecture ended than he was telling me to come and pay him ten points every week. I was so disappointed. But if I refused, he’d have really let me have it in the real world. I went afar to depopulated areas and dueled desperately, honestly collecting the points to pay to my brother. Like a dog. Oh, and in the process, he stole from me the last thing I had. My pride as a human being.”

No. I don’t want to hear this. Haruyuki held his breath and tried to shut out the pain he felt just listening to Nomi, almost as if his words themselves were some kind of attack. I don’t want to hear this story. I actually don’t need to hear it.

Taku, just hit him with the finishing blow. End this. We don’t have to sit here and listen to this story. How are we even supposed to know if it’s true or not? I mean, it has to be a lie. It’s a strategy to shake us up.

However, Haruyuki couldn’t stop the certain knowledge that what Nomi was saying was true—and that Takumu couldn’t cut into him like this.

Dusk Taker turned toward Cyan Pile, who had stopped moving, and continued talking. “But, you see, even stuck as I was, I saved points for myself bit by bit and leveled up. And then one day, this avatar, which had had no real power, came to have its first special attack. And that was Demonic Commandeer. During that same period, I obtained two significant powers: the BIC and knowledge of the Incarnate System. The Incarnate training was quite difficult. My guide told me over and over that I was wasting my time. But I endured it, my hatred of my brother feeding me. And then, yes, the moment finally came. The moment when I took back everything he—my brother—had ever taken from me.”

Keh-heh-heh-heh. The laugh and its resentful echo fell in drops in the field.

“I called my brother to the Unlimited Neutral Field and first took his abilities. Once that was done—he was so surprised—I tortured him to death with my Incarnate power. His HP slipped away a little too readily, so the second time I got more creative. Each time he was revived after an hour, my method of killing him got better. I can’t begin to put into words the feelings and pleasure of that time! Eventually, his points were exhausted, and when he came at me weeping and wailing, about to lose Brain Burst after one more death…Just remembering it even now, the laughter…hm-hm, heh-heh-heh, a-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

He clutched his stomach and laughed briefly before jerking his head up. “Nothing?! Empty?!” he shouted. “That, you see, isn’t me; that’s him now!! A former acceleration user, bereft of Brain Burst. There’s nothing more pathetic and miserable! I’m not like him…I have everything. In the Accelerated World and in the real world. And this illusion of friendship and bonds you all believe in…” The eyes beneath his visor glinted sharply. “I’ll take that from you, too, and leave nothing behind!!”

Nomi made a flourish with his right hand. From the stump of his shoulder where his arm had been cut off, black snakes shot out ferociously fast. Three tentacles, the Enhanced Armament he had equipped during his first fight with Haruyuki. He had secretly given the “equip” command and then waited for it to regenerate.

The ever-extending tentacles did not roar in assault at Takumu standing in front of Nomi. Nor did they lash out at Silver Crow, pinned in the vise.

They reached for Chiyuri—Lime Bell, silent this whole time, quietly sunk into the shadows of the distant school building.

“Wha…” Takumu couldn’t stop the short, stunned cry from slipping out, but he was, of course, quick to brandish his sword to cut the tentacles.

But a second before he could, the tentacles, snapping back like rubber, pushed under the blade of the avatar the color of fresh leaves they held captive.

His entire body squealing at the strain, Cyan Pile stopped his slashing attack. The tip of his blade just barely touched the brim of Lime Bell’s pointed hat, sending a trail of sparks flying.

The three tentacles immediately coiled themselves around Chiyuri and squeezed cruelly.

“Ngh!” The slender avatar threw her head back, the groan of pain slipping from between her teeth joined by Nomi’s stifled laughter.

“Heh-heh-heh-heh. Did you think I only called her here for her healing capacity? Ridiculous! I’ve long been aware that Lime Bell is your Achilles’ heel. You have to effectively use anything you can use…That’s the secret to the duel!”

“…You. Bastard…,” Takumu snarled, tip of his sword shaking, as Chiyuri tried to say something to him. However, several layers of tentacle immediately coiled over her mouth and kept her silent.

“Now then, please throw your sword down and remove that Enhanced Armament,” Nomi coolly instructed.

“Lime Bell isn’t part of the sudden-death duel,” Takumu countered in a voice like a creak. “She’s no good as a hostage.”

“Oh? Is that so?” Head cocked.

Dusk Taker casually grabbed Lime Bell near her right elbow, his right hand dripping with purple fluctuation.

Skrrk. An extremely, extremely unpleasant sound echoed in the air. The sound of the yellow-green arm being torn off at the elbow.

“Hnnngh!!” Lime Bell’s entire body convulsed and a soundless scream surged out of her. She threw her head back two, three times as far as it would go. Each time, an ocean of green sparks spurt forth from the stump.

Haruyuki’s vision was dyed a sudden red. An overwhelming rage swept through him, and in a trance, he struggled to break free. However, the black vise didn’t budge, almost as if sneering at his anger. In fact, the instant the light sword output he had been using to resist the pressure was disturbed by his anger, the vise pressed even more fiercely down on his shoulders.

“You…bastaaaaaaard!!” It was Takumu who yelled instead. The large avatar took a step forward when something hit his chest with a clang. Lime Bell’s torn-off arm. It bounced back and broke into countless polygon fragments in midair before disappearing.

“Do you understand, Mayuzumi? This is her first time diving into the Unlimited Neutral Field. This world where the sensation of pain is twice that of the lower field.”

Takumu didn’t need to be told. At that moment, Chiyuri was no doubt feeling pain equivalent to having her flesh-and-blood arm ripped off in the real world. Perhaps because of the severity of the shock, the thin avatar continued to ripple with tiny convulsions.

Cyan Pile was frozen in place, and before him, Nomi lifted his right hand once again. “And by doing this, I also increase her special-attack gauge so she can heal me.”

He thrust the tip of his sharp index finger into Chiyuri’s side. Thrk.

The green avatar recoiled fiercely. Even through the layers of tentacle coiled around her, they could clearly hear a thin scream. When Nomi pulled his finger out, a thin stream of sparks erupted from the cruel wound.

Thrk. One more time. And again.

“Stop!!” Takumu shouted in a cracking voice, immediately before Nomi could dig out a fourth hole. His entire body was shaking. The extra light wrapped around Takumu’s sword and arms flickered irregularly, like a poorly connected lightbulb.

No, Taku, Haruyuki wanted to shout. But he could say nothing. He knew too well that Takumu—and if it had been him, he, too—had no other choice.

“…Please, just stop…” Cyan Pile groaned. The Cyan Blade fell from his hands and clattered to the ground.

Immediately, it turned to light and melted away. The luminescence flowed through space, was sucked into Cyan Pile’s right arm, and turned back into the original stake.

When Takumu whispered the “unequip” command, the Enhanced Armament also disappeared. Once he saw this, Dusk Taker waved his left arm extravagantly and left Chiyuri somewhere off on the edge of the field. He didn’t even glance at Lime Bell, who huddled into herself against the pain.

The dark avatar charged at Cyan Pile and buried the talons of his right hand into the sturdy stomach. A wet noise joined the black arm as it broke out through his back. Leaving a torrent of pale sparks, Nomi yanked his arm back out.

Takumu staggered and dropped heavily to his knees before ceasing to move, head hanging.

“It’s because you believe in the lie of ‘bonds.’” Nomi’s voice was quiet, almost as if he really were feeling pity. “Or rather, it’s because you act like you believe this, that you will lose. If you really trusted each other, you would have cut through her and right into me. Isn’t that right?”

No…no, no!!

Haruyuki struggled, crazed. Sparks flew from the joints of his arms as he fought to free himself from the vise and save Takumu. Resisting with all his might, he howled in a voice that was not a voice.

What do you know?! There’s no way you could understand how strongly Takumu feels about Chiyuri!! If he had cut Chiyuri with you there, that wouldn’t be trust, just calculation!!

But the black lumps at his sides indifferently applied more pressure, as if trying to crush even his anger.

Why can’t I move?! Why can’t I even scream?! I have to move now; what has this all been for—

“Sorry, boy.” He heard a muted whisper from behind. The layered avatar, who had been silent all this time. “This attack stops you from talking as well as moving. So you can’t say anything and you can’t use voice commands. I’d like to at least let you say a few words of farewell to your friend there…Sorry.”

At these words, which sounded sincerely apologetic, Haruyuki’s anger flamed even higher and swept through his avatar.

Thmp. His back ached. Thmp. Thmp.

A throbbing like lightning pulsed in regular intervals between his shoulder blades. He felt like he could hear a voice. But, perhaps obstructed by the vise, it couldn’t reach all the way into Haruyuki’s awareness.

If he couldn’t talk, then he could only fight back with his will—his Laser Sword—but the pulsing anger prevented him from concentrating.

In the schoolyard, Dusk Taker had just raised his right hand at Cyan Pile, who was on his knees. The Nihilistic Fluctuation once again transformed into a thin sword. He sliced it through the air twice with a whoosh.

With a leaden sound, Cyan Pile’s arms were severed at the base and fell to the ground. Bundles of lightning cascaded from his shoulders.

Haruyuki could hear his voice.

Haru, I’m sorry.

I can’t fight anymore. I’m really sorry…

The tears welling up beneath Haruyuki’s silver mask blurred his vision. In the distorted screen, he watched Dusk Taker raise his sword high to bring down the final blow.

Here.

It ends here? This is my…This is Takumu’s Brain Burst ending?

This thought crystallized in his heart like a single droplet at absolute zero, and the flames of his rage turned to frost and scattered. His limbs went cold. The light of his hands burned up and disappeared. All the sensations of his body receded. The sign of avatar shutdown he had experienced so many times.

Oh, so that’s it? Zero fill. And this is a thing the Incarnate System makes happen, too. Negative imagination puts out the flames of your heart and turns your avatar into a cold lump.

What does it matter figuring that out now?

No, wait.

If zero fill is the negative will that all Burst Linkers can use, then the opposite must be true, too. Moving an avatar who can’t move with positive imagination. Like, say, even when he’s stuck in a vise with absolute strength. Like when, battered and broken, he stood up again next to the bed of black thorns she was sleeping in.

A small flame sprang to life in Haruyuki’s chest with a pop. But not the black flame of rage he had felt toward Nomi so many times now. Something better called determination. It was the pure power of heart he had learned from Kuroyukihime, and Niko, and Blood Leopard, and Sky Raker.

The meager heat began to melt the ice binding his body. The connection to his four limbs came back to life. From the thin seams and joints of Silver Crow’s mirrored armor came abruptly a blue luminescence akin to a high-temperature flame—Overlay.

However, unaware even of this, Haruyuki placed the palms of his hands flat against the vise on either side.

“Ngh…” A low moan slipped from his throat. Mustering every ounce of strength, he tried to open the gap. His avatar creaked and squealed, and an intense pain assaulted his elbows and shoulders. He heard a succession of high-pitched metallic pops, the sound of thin cracks racing up the armor of his arms. Blue light shone through those thin lines as well.

“Hng…Ah…Ah!” Clusters of pure pain exploded throughout his nervous system, and his consciousness was colored white. However, Haruyuki didn’t stop putting all his strength into his arms. His crumbling armor peeled off and scattered around his feet, and the blue aura wrapped around his slightly exposed dark gray body like a flame.

The black lumps of absolute hardness and pressure, however, didn’t so much as shudder. But Haruyuki believed.

Not in his own power.

He believed that the power of the people who had supported and guided him this far could not bend to the power of someone who believed that the Accelerated World was nothing more than a tool.

“Ah…Ah! Aaaaah!!” With his howl, every bit of armor on his upper body other than his helmet crumbled and blew away.

Blue flashes condensed, exploded, and colored the world.

Haruyuki felt it, just barely, for a mere instant: the constraint of the black vise weakening.

He kicked at the ground with everything he had. He scraped his shoulders on the walls and his HP gauge turned to sparks and scattered. He put all his energy into running the distance of a single step that might as well be infinite, and finally, Haruyuki slipped out of the restraint.

He fell to the ground. After a single somersault, he was back on his feet. Still running hard, he pulled in his right hand. Concentrated his will. Roared.

“Unh…Naaaaaaah!!”

The arm about to cut off Cyan Pile’s head stopped, and with an air of surprise, Dusk Taker turned. Haruyuki mustered what mental strength remained to him and launched his Laser Sword.

Schwiiing! The tip of the light blade reached through space more than five meters and severed in half two of the three tentacles of Nomi’s left hand.

That was all he could manage. The strength drained from his body, his feet tangled together, and Haruyuki fell facedown onto the ground.

Perhaps because he had mustered such a strong image, his consciousness flickered and registered Nomi’s voice from a distance.

“Goodness! Please don’t scare me like that, Arita.” He paused briefly. “Aren’t you lying down on the job a bit, letting your prey escape from your vise?”

“Unthinkable, really,” the layered avatar responded, also far away. “I was at full power. I really have to hand it to this little guy: He’s quite the trooper. That said, it seems he’s about finished.”

Haruyuki stared hollowly as the thin panels rose up around him once more. Shifting his gaze, in the center of his upside-down world, he could see Dusk Taker brandishing his purple sword to at last strike the final blow against Takumu. He could no longer think. His mental powers were so exhausted, he couldn’t even feel despair.

“Well, then…farewell, Cyan Pile.”

The nihilistic blade slid through space.

The afterimages of several half circles lingering in the air, the blade slid toward the nape of the blue avatar’s neck—

Haruyuki closed his eyes, and just as he was on the verge of cutting loose of his consciousness.

Klink.

A crisp sound.

Nomi’s blade, about to touch Takumu’s neck, was severed at the base and melted into nothingness.

Incarnate can’t be cut without another Incarnate attack.

It wasn’t Haruyuki. And there was no reason for the layered avatar holding him to interfere with Nomi. Which meant another new Burst Linker on the battlefield.

Haruyuki opened his eyes wide and lifted his head as if guided by something to stare up into the night sky before him.

The magnificent palace was a dim white. On top of the spire in the center that had originally been the stairs at Umesato Junior High was a silhouette shouldering the enormous blue full moon. A mounted figure.

The sturdy black horse’s mane fluttered in the wind, eyes glittering white, and four hooves enveloped in blue flames. A slim rider straddled its back neatly.

Black crystal armor sleekly reflecting the light of the moon. Sharp V-shaped mask. Black lotus skirt encircling a slender body. Both arms long, razor-edge swords. The legs also swords. A sage brilliance that seemed to cut through even the moonlight pouring down.

“…Aah.”

A quiet voice, almost a sigh, spilled from Haruyuki’s mouth. And again. “Aaaah…” He felt like if he said anything more, the rider and mount would turn into a hallucination and disappear.

But the rider nodded slightly, as if hearing his whispers as he lay on his side off in the distance, and lightly spurred the mount on with her right foot.

The horse raised its front legs high into the air, and then clapped its hooves down. Neighing fiercely, blue flames erupting from its nostrils, it began to run through the air. The duel avatars on the ground watched soundlessly while the mount and rider arrived at a point directly above the schoolyard, carving out a pale arc in the night sky.

Here, the rider made her body dance lightly. She opened up the long swords of her hands and approached the ground, almost sliding. Right before she landed, she kicked her legs out, straight down. With a ringing echo, the avatar dropped to the white ground on the tip of her right sword leg.

The black horse in the sky finished the arc and disappeared, as if melting, as soon as it started to dash off into the southwestern sky.

After seeing it off, the jet-black avatar was quick to look straight at Haruyuki, to whom she nodded again. She turned to the raised face of Cyan Pile before her eyes shifted to the distant layered avatar and the still-fallen Lime Bell in turn. Finally, the avatar stared at Dusk Taker. Violet-blue eyes glittered visibly beneath the mirrored mask.

“…Im…possible.” Nomi’s rasping voice. “Impossible. Why…How are you…Why are you here?”

The same stunned question was living inside Haruyuki. But much greater than that was the overwhelming emotion that filled and overfilled his heart, and he could say nothing. Still on the ground, he could only stare raptly at the beautiful black crystal duel avatar.

Nomi groaned once more. “Impossible. Did you come back from Okinawa by yourself for this battle alone? No, even if you had, you couldn’t have made it in time. This can’t be…Why—How are you here?! Black King…Black Lotus!!”

Yes, the jet-black avatar could have been none other than Black Lotus, the Black King, occupying one of the seats of the Seven Kings of Pure Color, leader of the Nega Nebulus Legion.

However, her real-world self, Kuroyukihime, vice president of the student council and ninth-grade student at Umesato Junior High, was currently supposed to be on a school trip in Okinawa. And Haruyuki and Takumu had only decided on the time for this final battle a little more than an hour earlier in real-world time. Assuming she had managed to find out about it somehow, she wouldn’t have been able to get back to Tokyo from Okinawa.

Nomi’s howling showering her, Kuroyukihime shook her mask coolly and spoke for the first time. “You’re Dusk Taker? You seem quite proud of your ingenuity. But you’re still soft. There are countless ways of fighting in the Accelerated World, ways you haven’t even dreamed of.”

Even as her voice was silky smooth, her words had a razor-sharp edge to them and cut through the virtual space. Nomi inched a half step backward.

“I haven’t come back to Tokyo; there’s no need for that. Let me remind you of the basic rules of Brain Burst. In the Normal Duel Field, there is a time limit of eighteen hundred seconds and movement restrictions due to the area boundaries. However, in the Unlimited Neutral Field, there is neither. Which is why it’s unlimited. Understand?” Brandishing the sword of her right hand, Kuroyukihime declared crisply, “In this world, Okinawa and Tokyo are connected! Hmm, seems you finally get it. That’s right. I dove into this field in Okinawa and ran to Tokyo. Although I did have to tame that divine-level Enemy earlier. And it took about fifteen hours to get here. Still, in the real world, it didn’t even take a single minute.”

“…Wh-what…” Nomi gasped in amazement, and Haruyuki felt the shock run through his own body as well.

He had visited the Unlimited Neutral Field many times before, and had in fact wondered more than once just how far this world spread out. But it was just an idle thought; he had never even considered trying to check. But the answer turned out to be quite simple: As far as the social network cameras ran, so too the medium for the Accelerated World reached. Put another way, the whole of Japan, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south.

But who on earth would think to cross this expansive world all alone? This was no safe, touristy VR world. It was a place of death filled with swaggering Enemies so large they could easily kick around several dozen Burst Linkers.

Except for this one person here.

“Kuro…yuki…hime,” Haruyuki whispered. Beneath his cracked mask, hot tears welled up and spilled over.

She turned her eyes once more to Haruyuki, and for the first time, he felt the hint of a smile from her. However, she soon checked that and shifted her gaze to the layered avatar, the owner of the vise restraining Silver Crow.

Ting! came a sharp metallic sound as pale sparks lit up the darkness.

When the black panels holding him disappeared, Haruyuki was slow to grasp what had happened.

Not moving her avatar in the slightest, Kuroyukihime had launched a long-distance attack using Incarnate, with just the faint light housed in her right arm. The layered avatar had met this with his own Incarnate. Thus, the image of the vise imprisoning Haruyuki had been released and the prison had disappeared.

Ting! Tinnng! Light bounded through the sky three more times. The phenomenon was visually modest, but the attacks crashing into each other made their immensity known, and Haruyuki felt the field itself beneath him shake violently.

The force was such that it made it hard to breathe, and he was not surprised at all that Kuroyukihime, a king, could use an Incarnate Attack. After all, Niko, who was also level nine but had had a considerably shorter career, was able to demonstrate an attack of awe-inspiring power. But the power of the layered avatar fighting her attack head-on was also bottomless.

“Your name?” Black Lotus asked briefly when she paused in her attack, as if the exchange of volleys just finishing up were a formal greeting.

Twenty or so meters away, the layered avatar inclined the thin panels of his head hesitatingly. The same gentle voice, a dead ringer for the young teacher’s, flowed out. “Giving my name here would really be pointless. But a king such as yourself has come all this way to be with us. I suppose it would be rude to not at least introduce myself.”

There was a whistling sound as several black panels rose up from the avatar’s feet and arranged themselves into his right arm, which had been missing until then. There was no mistake: They were the vise that had been restraining Haruyuki all this time.

The avatar brought this right arm to his chest and bent at the waist to bow. His voice rang out again. “I’m the vice president of the group the Acceleration Research Society…My name is Black Vise. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

From possibly the moment Haruyuki had seen the armor, he had had a faint premonition. But actually hearing the name, he still couldn’t help feeling an enormous blow.

Black. The pure color black.

The color he had been convinced crowned only Black Lotus herself. In fact, up to that point, Haruyuki had never once heard of any doubling of the color names given to any of the Burst Linkers in the Accelerated World.

In contrast with Haruyuki and his stunned eyes opened wide, Kuroyukihime herself didn’t seem the slightest bit ruffled. She simply sighed lightly. “Hmph, not a Legion but a ‘group,’ hmm? Quite elaborate, no?”

“Apologies. Society policy.”

“Obviously, I’m no fan of the name. And I do need to thank you for inflicting such severe pain on my Legion member. Twofold, naturally.” Her bluish-purple eyes emitted a dangerous light. An aura the same color took up residence in the swords of both hands.

In response, the layered avatar—Black Vise—spread his hands in a gesture that showed no hint of tension. “Well, this is a problem. The one who injured your friend for the most part was not me but Taker. Although, well, I suppose I’m in no position to ask you to let it go.”

A pale black aura came to life in one of his slowly lowered arms, followed by several panels being soundlessly released, to sink as if sliding into the shadows at his feet.

“Kuro…”

Watch out! Haruyuki started to shout. However, by that time, two panels had already flown up from Kuroyukihime’s feet and snapped up around her so quickly he could barely see them.

Clang! The panels crashed into her arms. The thin sheets immediately increased in volume, transforming into enormous lumps. It was Black Vise’s Incarnate Attack, Static Pressure. Having himself been mercilessly subjected to the terrifying assault, which completely prevented any movement or speech on the part of the captured avatar, Haruyuki forgot the pain coursing through his own body and tried to shout again. But before he could—

Clink! A crisp echo through the field.

Blue lines traversed the two jet-black lumps.

Haruyuki stared in amazement as the lumps slid to the sides from the center and fell heavily to the ground. Kuroyukihime, appearing from inside with her arms out slightly, said, as if nothing had happened, “Unfortunately, physical restraint does not work on me.”

The severed cuboids turned back into panels and sank into the ground. This time, the sword of Kuroyukihime’s right arm emitted a red flame with a roar.

“Vorpal Strike!!” Coldly uttering the attack name, she launched an intense emptiness.

The motion was very similar to that of Black Lotus’s special attack Death by Piercing, but the range was wildly different. The red lance spilling from the sword howled metallically and lunged at the distant Black Vise.

The layered avatar, dyed a glossless black, raised his left arm straight ahead, gray aura swirling. “Layered Armor.”

The panels of his arm leapt off, each transforming into a large square. The ten or so flat squares lined up horizontally, leaving gaps, and stood in the way of the red lance, protecting the main body of the avatar.

The thundering roar of the impact shook the world.

The lance pierced 90 percent of the way through the protective panels the layers created and then stopped but did not disappear. The air squealed and creaked as the weapon shone brightly, trying to pierce the remaining panels.

The two Burst Linkers named Black, hands thrust out, fought each other’s will.

Despite the extremity of the situation, Kuroyukihime glanced over at Haruyuki and ordered in a stern yet gentle voice, “Now, stand up, Silver Crow. I’ll keep this one in check. You defeat your enemy—Dusk Taker.”

A second earlier, Haruyuki had thought that there was not a shred of fighting power left within him. But the words of his beloved sword master pierced his heart, almost as if they were even another form of the will, and reignited the fire that was about to extinguish.

“Right,” he responded in a hoarse but determined voice. He bent the knees of his battered avatar, thrust his hands into the ground, and stood, albeit wobblingly. Just over 30 percent left in his HP gauge. He turned his face toward Dusk Taker, a way off, and Cyan Pile next to him.

Consciousness perhaps inhibited by the intense pain of having his stomach pierced and both arms gone, Takumu’s head was still hanging heavily. There was no light from the eyes beneath the mask. But he was still there. He was alive.

Dusk Taker, as if finally waking from the shock, slowly raised his right hand to cover the visor of his face. “Heh. Heh. Heh-heh.” The sneering laugh Haruyuki had heard countless times already slipped thinly from between his fingers. “Heh-heh. Honestly. You truly are disgusting people. Do you intend to keep playing make-believe with your friendship, your bonds, your what-have-you forever? You say you ran from Okinawa? Heh-heh, the height of madness. Really.”

Vmm! He waved his hand. A hazy fluctuation entangled itself around the talons.

“But, well, this does save me some trouble, doesn’t it? Once I destroy the puppet here and that little bug, then it’s just Black Lotus. You might call yourself a king, but there’s no way you can take on the both of us. In fact, this is some unparalleled good fortune. In one hour, at a single time, I’ll torment you plenty and kill you all. Until your points are entirely gone. Heh-heh, keh-heh-heh-heh.”

Haruyuki was essentially ignoring the mocking voice. His consciousness was turned only toward the badly injured Takumu and Chiyuri, still collapsed in the distance. The scene of Nomi trampling the pair flashed up on the screen in the back of his mind. Chiyuri, arm ripped off, screaming. Takumu, stomach gouged out, fallen. What they felt was not just a virtual pain. It was the pain of their friendship and love being used and stomped all over. It was the despair of the thing they cherished more than anything being sullied and destroyed.

As Haruyuki clenched both hands into fists, his entire body trembling, Nomi turned toward him and said consolingly, “But please be reassured. I’ll save her, Lime Bell, at least. And not for the reason this puppet here said, because I can’t take her healing power. I do it in deference to the lady’s loyalty. Her devotion is indeed praiseworthy. I’ll make sure to lavish attention on her. Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

From between teeth gritted so hard they were about to crumble, Haruyuki squeezed his words out. “Nomi. You’re wrong.”

“About what? And since when?” The twilight-colored avatar cocked his head.

Haruyuki glared at him. “Everything. Right from the start,” he declared softly. “When you started at Umesato, you could’ve just challenged any one of us to a duel like a normal person and said, Hey, nice to meet you. All you had to do was say, I want to join the Legion. Then you could’ve gotten what you really wanted. Companions, friendship, bonds.”

Dusk Taker froze in place. An entirely different voice, lower, colder, came from beneath his visor. “What did you say? Me? Companions?”

“Yeah. You’re just like Taku and me. You were tortured and scarred mentally, and then you became a Burst Linker. You should’ve learned through duels that the real bonds we’ve been looking for exist in the Accelerated World. Why couldn’t you believe in that? Why would you turn to the fake power of a BIC? I know you must’ve had the opposite choice.”

A few seconds of silence followed, and then a terrifying aura abruptly gushed from Nomi’s entire body. Haruyuki knew that it was an incredibly angry pulsation, and that its source was the feelings locked up in the very depths of Nomi’s heart.

“So in other words, is this what you’re saying?” Nomi asked in a voice that was not a voice. “That you forgive me. That you pity me, so you’ll be my friend. That in your boundless mercy, you are reaching out a hand of salvation to me. Is that it?”

“Oh no.” Haruyuki immediately shook his head. “I’m totally not doing that. You and I will never understand each other at this point. Let’s settle this, Seiji Nomi.”

Naturally, there was anger toward Nomi inside of Haruyuki. But a simple feeling far stronger than that became a superheated blue flame and filled his body: determination. It was the resolute intention to put an end to all of this, right here, right now. The flame burned so hotly, without wavering in the slightest, that it was almost static. Like the cold stars twinkling in the night sky.

In contrast, Nomi’s body radiated a raging tornado of anger and he laughed briefly one more time. “Heh-heh. That’s a relief. You narrowly missed being unable to forgive your pathetic self in the real world, once I take care of your avatar here…I suppose we could settle this now, Haruyuki Arita. This world doesn’t need two fliers, after all.”

He raised his right hand, clenched it into a fist, and yanked it back. The black wings on his back, folded up all this time, flapped wide open.

Haruyuki also lifted his right hand high up in the sky, opened his palm, and cried: “Equip Gale Thruster!”

Chk! A large sky-blue star sparkled in the inky sky before becoming two laser beams shooting down at the ground. They hit Haruyuki’s back, but, still glittering, the light stopped there and took shape, finally producing the beautiful Enhanced Armament.

Dusk Taker spread his wings even farther and flapped them hard.

The boosters on Silver Crow’s back started to whine, the high-pitched noise of operation.

The only two flying duel avatars in the Accelerated World locked eyes for a brief instant and stilled.

Nomi was the first to kick off the ground, but by the smallest of margins. Dragging the remaining tentacle of his left arm like a tail, the membrane wings beat the air, and a clearly demonic silhouette rose up in a straight line.

Haruyuki carefully watched that trajectory, hips dropped in a low ready position.

“Go!!” At the same time as his sharp call, he opened the boosters all the way. Blue jets of fire scorched the white earth. An almost terrifying propulsive force shot the small avatar up into the air, and he immediately chased after the dark shadow.

Glancing down, Nomi flapped just one wing forcefully. Turning sharply, he brandished his right hand. “Sheeeeh!!” he howled, and the purple fluctuation stretched out into long talons, carving out five arcs in the night sky.

In return, Haruyuki readied the fingers of his right hand. “Laser…Sword!!”

The sword of white light met the purple talons from directly below and collided fiercely. Their weapons were crossed for an instant. The tip of the light sword and the ends of the talons all severed, the pair faced each other and fought with what remained of their Incarnate weapons.

A thick gash raked Dusk Taker’s chest, but five thin scars etched into Silver Crow’s, sending dichromatic sparks flying. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Haruyuki continued to ascend, and when the energy gauge for the boosters was exhausted, he opened his hands and dropped in free fall.

The price he paid for the overwhelming propulsive power of the Gale Thruster, the Enhanced Armament he had been given by Sky Raker, was that it used up the entire gauge once it was ignited. He couldn’t break the jet propulsion up into chunks and hover by adjusting the power. Once he reached the pinnacle of the ascent trajectory, all he could do was control the direction of descent with the booster stabilizers. Normally, you would have to wait nearly ten minutes for the gauge to be full again.

But Haruyuki was able to overwrite the system with the message that he could fly, using the Movement Expansion Incarnate. Of course, he was nowhere near the level where he could fly with that alone. But at the moment, with the Gale Thruster on his back, he could use the power of his imagination to get the system to reduce the gauge-charging time to the bare minimum.

He might have been far from mastering the Incarnate System, but by combining the image of flight—which was in his bones thanks to all his experience in the sky—with the system-type propulsive power of the Gale Thruster, Haruyuki could fly.

The problem was it took almost five seconds to activate the Incarnate to recover the gauge.

And Nomi, who had watched him do the Incarnate charge in the previous fight, knew that, too.

As he fell, Haruyuki spread his hands far out to his sides and visualized the clear image of flapping the wings on his back through the sky. Following Niko’s advice to reduce the activation time, he figured he had better give this Incarnate a name, too. But he felt a serious resistance to giving the desire to fly an “attack name” and fixing the image.

Because this was a wish that had been secreted away in the depths of his heart for a long, long time—it was the core that produced this avatar, Silver Crow—what else could he call it but hope?

Thus, Haruyuki simply prayed silently. I can fly. Even if my wings have been stolen, no matter how much pain I’m suffering, no matter how many times I’m made to crawl, I will still aim for the sky.

This prayer was, to Nomi, however, a serious opening.

“You think I’m going to let you?!” Dusk Taker called fiercely and worked his black wings madly, charging in a straight line.

Haruyuki mustered all his mental stretch to ignore the ominous flapping and completed his image. In his heart, a clear blue sky unfolded. The excess light became illusory wings and was released, pouring into the booster sitting there and becoming a fuel called determination.

Skrrk! He felt an intense impact and five talons dug deeply into his chest, crisscrossing his earlier wound.

“Hng!” Sparks cascaded down to the ground as he groaned. Haruyuki popped his eyes open and grabbed on to the tentacle of Dusk Taker’s left arm as he tried to fly away.

The wings, being the materialization of the flying ability, definitely had a much higher degree of freedom than the boosters. But they had a weak point: In compensation for that high maneuverability, they lacked stability.

Yanked by his own tentacle in Haruyuki’s hand, Nomi abruptly lost his balance and fell into a half tailspin. Using that force, Haruyuki whirled around with all his might and severed the tentacle in one stroke of his light sword. Centrifugal force was added to his propulsive force, and Dusk Taker shot through the sky horizontally.

“Tcch!” A cry of anger slipping from between his lips, Nomi frantically flapped his wings to regain balance. But control did not return so easily.

Haruyuki turned his body in Nomi’s direction, took a deep breath, and yelled, “Flyyyyy!!”

The Gale Thruster responded with the throaty sound of flames.

Haruyuki charged through the dark night, a blue shooting star. The light of the ground and the stars in the sky all melted away in circles around him; his eyes saw only the clear form of Dusk Taker. He drew his right hand in. Lined up his fingers. There was no longer any need to shout the attack name. The pure thought pierce turned into light and moved into his hand, quavering violently.

“Aaaaaah!!”

Riding this howl, Haruyuki released a platinum luminescence into the center of the radial light.

“Sheeeaaah!!” Recovered, Nomi met him with the talons of his right hand and a battle yell.

An explosive shock wave roared through the world, piercing with its resonance.

The tip of the light sword was held fast deep within the five talons of nothingness, effectively stopping it. But right hands extended, the point where the two avatars met grew powerfully hot, clashing vibrations singeing their masks.

“Ugh, ah, yaah!!” Haruyuki throttled the energy of the gauge jetting out from the boosters, attempting to break Nomi’s defense. The thunder on his back grew infinitely louder. The flames reached out endlessly, dyeing the sky blue.

A little more. I can reach him if I just push a little harder. My sword will reach the ultimate enemy. A little more…Just a little…!!

Even with his accelerated senses, he could see the energy gauge in the top left of his field of view dropping rapidly. Once the gauge was exhausted, Nomi would no doubt slice him up with those claws and not allow him the window he needed to Incarnate-charge. He had to break through before that!

“Ah…Aaah!!”

His overheated brain burned his vision into whiteness. But he had already wrung his imagination dry and nearly pierced the wall before him.

Skrrk. Skrrk. The silver light pushed into the nothingness. His gauge emptied mercilessly.

Perhaps because he had been so focused on the extremely concentrated attack, the field itself rippled and shuddered. The light sword pushed into the center of this ripple, bit by small bit.

It hit him. The tip of his sword finally touched the palm of Nomi’s actual hand.

And the final pixel glittering in the energy gauge disappeared.

The thunder of combustion wavered, and the jet of flames flickered.

A wild smile rose up on the lips beneath Dusk Taker’s visor.

And then—

“Now, Corvus. A little more.”

He heard a voice, and a pale hand came to support his right arm.

“Come on, fight. Just a little more.”

Another voice rang in his ears, and someone pushed on his shoulder.

“Ungh…Ah…Aaaaaah!!” Haruyuki howled, focusing his remaining power on the single point of his right hand. Although it was for a mere moment, an enormous flame jetted from the boosters, despite the empty gauge.

This final propulsive force shot him forward and the sword of light finally broke through the wall of nothingness. The five talons scattered into purple phosphorescence and evaporated.

“What—” As if to drown Nomi’s gasp:

Kreeeeeeen!!

The superextended sword of light cut Dusk Taker’s right arm perfectly in two, and the pieces fell apart into countless fragments.

“Ngaaah!!”

Haruyuki’s consciousness was exhausted, to the point where it was a mystery that he could still move. Even in this half-autopilot state, however, with an overarm stroke, he plunged his left hand into the chest of his enemy as hard as he could, before he could drop from the heights of the sky.

The light of his Incarnate was so weak it was barely visible, but he felt a powerful resistance nonetheless as his arm pierced the darkness avatar, the tip coming out through its back.

“Hng!…Nnnngh!” Scattering reddish-purple sparks, Nomi groaned and his upper body reeled.

One more hit!!

If he hit Dusk Taker with one more serious blow, his HP gauge would be finished.

But Haruyuki would almost certainly die with him. He didn’t have enough power left to control his descent, much less charge the Gale Thruster one more time. He had just the barest amount of HP left; if he crashed into the ground from this height, he would vanish in short order.

But even if I do, that’s okay.

As long as we both go down and all of our points are given to Cyan Pile, as long as Takumu takes up this dream of mine, my fighting won’t have been in vain.

Whipping up his awareness, which threatened to disappear, Haruyuki raised his right hand high above him. Setting his aim on the black visor of his enemy, who had also nearly lost consciousness, he readied the final blow—

But the instant he went to strike, he heard a voice.

“Citron Call!!”

A voice he had heard so much and so often, maybe more than his own mother’s, the voice he had been listening to the longest. They laughed together, played, sometimes fought, quickly made up. That voice—

Mesmerized, Haruyuki looked at the ground. A pillar of beautiful emerald-green light soared up from the avatar the color of fresh leaves standing quietly in the schoolyard and enveloped Dusk Taker.

The ringing of infinite bells spread out through the night sky.

As if it were the blessing of an angel, the light restored the dusk-colored avatar. The cracked and scorched armor regained its sheen. Lost arms were regenerated.

An instantaneous and painfully deep despair blanketed Haruyuki.

In the depths of the black spherical mask, reddish-purple eyes blinked and shone brightly once again.

“Heh-heh, ha-ha-ha-ha!” The shrill laugh. “Ha-ha-ha! A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

The regenerated arms opened wide, wider, and Dusk Taker screamed, “See? Isn’t that loyalty absolutely worthy of praise?! So…this is power! This is ruling!! Friendship?! Bonds?! As if I need those!! Rule through pillage!! That alone is absolute power!! Ha-ha-ha-ha…Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!” The twisted, loud laughter became an aura and scattered purple electricity racing through the sky.

“Now…it’s time…to settle thiiiiis!!” The Nihilistic Fluctuation reached out from ten sinisterly tapered fingers. On the verge of splitting apart Haruyuki’s body—

Something happened.

The pop of an intense glimmer.

The devil wings sprouting from Dusk Taker’s back, spread out to both sides, were shining. Cracks raced through them as though they had been transformed into ultrathin glass. They began to crumble noisily.

And then disappeared.

“Wha—” Nomi gasped, eyelids flying all the way up. “Wh-wh-why are my wings dis—”

Before he could finish, the two avatars shuddered heavily. The flying power that had been keeping them in midair had disappeared, and they began to fall, still entangled.

But Haruyuki soon felt something trying to pull him back. It was hot. A modest, living heat sitting at the tips of his shoulder blades. The speed of Silver Crow’s descent alone eased, and his left hand, still piercing Dusk Taker, was pulled free.

The twilight avatar, hands still spread out in mute amazement, fell backward toward the earth.

In contrast, Haruyuki slowed even more, until he finally felt a sense of buoyancy and came to a stop.

It wasn’t Gale Thruster. That gauge was completely empty, and the Enhanced Armament remained silent.

Right. This feeling. A yearning that made him want to cry, an exaltation.

“Ah. Ah…” As the sound slipped out of him, tears welled up in both eyes.

The heat in his shoulder blades gradually became hotter. The energy grew and swirled, seeking an outlet. Almost as if his bones were waking up the memory of the organ formerly attached there.

Guided by something, Haruyuki raised his hands and crossed them in front of his body. He clenched his fists. He put his power into it.

“Welcome home. Thank you,” he murmured and threw his arms out to the sides.

Claaaang!!

A sound more beautiful than any other filled the night sky.

Even without being able to see directly, Haruyuki knew. Ten metal fins had been deployed on his back on both sides of the booster, shining silver in the reflected moonlight. Platinum wings. The power to reach the heavens, the reason for Silver Crow’s existence.

He was finally back. To his original form. To being the sole flying duel avatar in the Accelerated World, a power nurtured and created by his own mental scars.

This conviction and emotion overflowed in his heart—and then something else happened.

The Gale Thruster fused with the wings and the gauge glittered as if linked to them, automatically refilling. He felt like it was telling him to fly.

Haruyuki nodded, and, drawing his right hand into his chest, he turned his body straight down.

In the center of the endlessly unfolding white field, he could see the tiny shadow of Dusk Taker yet falling. He might have lost his wings, but his HP would have been recovered with the power of Citron Call. He might have been able to endure a crash from extremely high up.

But I’m ending this.

Haruyuki spread his silver wings. The fins began to vibrate lightly. A familiar propulsive force enveloped his body. At the same time, the Gale Thruster ignited. Blue flames were reflected by the silver wings, glittering gorgeously. He held his breath at the awe-inspiring surge of energy.

“Goooooooo!!” Haruyuki shouted

A platinum aura radiated from his wings. The blue jet of flames gushed out farther. At once, Haruyuki broke through the wall of air and flew.

He was likely moving faster than any avatar had ever moved since the beginnings of the Accelerated World. With the propulsive force of the wings and the booster, plus the pull of the virtual gravity, Haruyuki charged ahead, a single bolt of lightning.

Even accelerated as he was, the rest happened in an instant.

With the Incarnate sword in his right hand as the tip, Silver Crow transformed into an arrow of light and closed in on the falling Dusk Taker, touched him, and then plunged through him.

Pop! The dusky avatar flew apart in pieces, spinning from the center of his body. Pushing past where their weapons had crossed without touching these polygon fragments, Haruyuki straightened out his wings and pointed his booster straight down.

The propulsion counterbalanced the ferocity of his descent, and he decelerated before coming to a stop. The soles of his feet grasped the surface of the earth. Crumbling to his knees, Haruyuki heard a heavy crash a moment later. He fought the sudden exhaustion that washed over him and lifted his head.

Looking out at the Umesato Junior High schoolyard near where he had landed revealed a black lump tumbling along.

Dusk Taker. But all that was left of him was his head, chest, and the short tentacles that had started to regenerate from his left shoulder. The eyes beneath his visor were very dim and flickered irregularly. If he had anything left in his HP gauge, it had to be less than 10 percent.

Haruyuki dragged himself to his feet. After he had taken one, two steps, he heard a voice.

“Wh…y…Why…My wings. Disappeared…,” Nomi moaned, as if this were an even bigger shock than having his body blown away.

It wasn’t Haruyuki who answered.

“That’s…because my power isn’t healing.”

He jerked his head up, and there was Chiyuri—Lime Bell. She was holding her side and the deep holes that had been gouged out of it with her severed right arm.

And standing beside her was Cyan Pile, missing both arms. He could also see Black Lotus and Black Vise facing each other, both on guard, holding themselves in ready positions, but they seemed to have stopped their Incarnate attacks.

“Wh…what?” Nomi muttered hoarsely. “If it’s not…a healing ability, then what are you saying it is?”

“Ever since I became a Burst Linker, I thought it was weird,” Chiyuri replied quietly after a brief silence. “Like, why would I be given this healing power? But, well…after I healed you for the first time in fifth period on Tuesday, I was talking with Haru and Taku, and I figured it out. Haru said it wasn’t just your wounds and HP that were healed; even the machine in your right arm came back. I thought that was pretty strange. That’s not healing; it’s more like repair. And then…I understood.”

Taking a deep breath, the fresh green avatar announced crisply, “My power’s not healing. It’s turning back time. Time for the avatar it hits goes backward. Which is why…I thought, if I used this power, I could for sure get Haru’s wings back. I could rewind time to before Dusk Taker stole Silver Crow’s ability and make it like the whole thing never happened.”

So that’s it. Haruyuki felt a keen pain throb deep in his heart. Tears blurred his vision once again. And I doubted her. I couldn’t trust my old friend when she was trying so hard for me. I’m an idiot. A super, total idiot.

Hanging his head low, Haruyuki heard a deeply resentful voice rise up from the ground below.

“What…You betrayed me? You betrayed me, Lime Bell?” Having lost his body and being near death, Nomi shouted as though his anger gave him power. “After I let you win, after I gave you vast oceans of points, you betray me?!”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t betray you at all,” Chiyuri responded, sounding like she had gotten back just a little of her usual contrary spirit. “The first time I healed you was because you threatened me with the video. And I obeyed you after that to level up and extend the amount of time I could go back…and also for this one chance today. I’ve never once been your friend!”

A brief silence fell once again.

The dusk-colored avatar shook the ruins of his body and abruptly laughed quietly. “Heh. Heh-heh-heh. Honestly…this one, that one, idiots all of you. I’m sick of looking at your faces; I’m leaving. I’ll spread all of your real identities and let someone else finish you off. I’m going to transfer schools and build my own kingdom. Now then, what are you doing, Vise? Hurry up and get me out of here.”

Haruyuki jerked his face up and looked over at the layered avatar facing off with Black Lotus in the distance.

“Well, this puts me in a bit of a spot,” the jet-black avatar said gently, slowly cocking his head to one side. “Given the situation, that is a very difficult request to respond to, Taker.”

“Well then, make the effort. If I’m gone and I’m the main force, then the Research Society itself is in a bit of a spot, isn’t it? The BIC information might even be leaked.”

“Oh no, I don’t think that’s a concern. Our BICs have been customized to automatically inactivate the instant they detect when we lose Brain Burst. The chip ends up dissolving into the cerebrospinal fluid and disappears, so tracing us is impossible. And, well…Taker, you of all people should know that former acceleration users are no longer able to interfere in this world in any way.”

Haruyuki couldn’t even begin to understand the meaning of what Black Vise was saying.

But Nomi raised his head with a start and glared at the moon directly above. “Dammit! Dammit!! Daaaaaammiiiiiit!!” he howled for a while, before snarling at them again. “I won’t accept that! I will not allow this to happen! Anyone! Anyone’s fine! Come here! Help me! If you do, I’ll give you points!!”

That’s enough.

The moment Haruyuki had this thought, Takumu looked at him and said, “Should we end this, Haru?”

“Yeah.” Nodding, Haruyuki started to walk. To put an end to it all.

As soon as Dusk Taker saw Silver Crow approaching, he began to scream, “S-stop! Okay! From now on, I’ll pay tribute in points to you! That’s not a bad deal, right?! And I’ll even join your Legion for you!!”

As he walked, Haruyuki raised his right hand. A white luminescence grew out of his readied fingers.

“Stop! No! I don’t want to lose it! My power! My acceleration!! No, no…Noooooooooo!!” His torso recoiling as he twisted himself inside out, Dusk Taker tried to gain some distance by scrabbling at the earth with his short tentacles.

With a frozen heart, Haruyuki brandished the sword of light high. It flashed down without hesitation.

The air shook and a thin line of light raced along the decorative tiles, stretching out to swallow up Dusk Taker, who was crawling along in front of it. The twilight avatar was soundlessly split in two, straight down the center.

Immediately, an enormous pillar of reddish-purple flame shot up. From inside the flames, countless ribbons of light were released into the sky, only to melt into the air and disappear. The ribbons were woven from detailed digital code; it was a phenomenon that accompanied the final annihilation of a Burst Linker, something he had seen only once before.

In that moment, the marauder who had reigned over Umesato Junior High and held Haruyuki and his friends under his overwhelmingly heavy boot was gone forever from the Accelerated World.

As he stood there stock-still, the system font announcing the conclusion of the sudden-death duel shone redly in Haruyuki’s vision. A large quantity of burst points was added to his stock, followed by a message to the effect that he could now advance to level five.

However, he felt no exultation in the victory or even a sense of achievement, just the recognition that it was all over. He dragged his battered body a few steps toward Chiyuri and Takumu.

“Now then.”

He heard a resolute voice: Kuroyukihime, who had until that point held the mysterious Burst Linker Black Vise in complete check with an Incarnate battle.

“I have a great many things to ask you, but you don’t look like you have any intention of talking. In which case, let’s finish this already.”

At this, the layered avatar shook his head emphatically.

“No, in these few minutes, I’ve seen to the point of unpleasantness the actual power of a king. I really don’t have a chance of winning. I’ll simply quietly take my leave here.” His voice was calm, as if he thought nothing of the fact that his companion had completely disappeared before his eyes.

Kuroyukihime gracefully raised the sword of her right hand. “Say what you will; I’m under no obligation to let you go,” she whispered in a voice like knives. “I’ll cut you down where you stand and use the hour until you regenerate to carefully consider how to properly deal with you.”

“Ooh! Scary!” Black Vise batted her words aside lightly as he shrugged. “But my greatest ability is fleeing. Oh, but before that, one thing. I harbor not a shred of ill will toward you all in the Black Legion. I came here because Taker asked me to and paid for my services in advance. Naturally, I received absolutely no information about any of you in the real, and if possible, I would like to have nothing to do with you ever again.”

“Too late,” Kuroyukihime retorted coolly, and the sword of her right arm was clad in a red aura, the left in blue.

Taking a step forward, there, ahead of her, abruptly, bizarrely, Black Vise clapped together the countless thin panels making up his body. Where he had stood, there was now a single black panel—nothing more than a shadow. From Haruyuki’s position, he could just barely make out the shape, but head-on, it was essentially invisible.

“Well then, you all take care.” Immediately, the thin panel sank down, melting into the shadows of the schoolyard spreading out at their feet. A whistling sound followed as the avatar sped away.

“Hngh!!” With a slight battle cry, Kuroyukihime waved her right arm straight up into the air.

A red line raced along the ground, bit into the school, and began to climb.

“Uh, ah?!” Haruyuki cried out in surprise as he watched as the southwestern corner of the chalk palace—where the staff room and the principal’s office were in the real world—was cut off and crumbled in a heap. Mixed in with the many white objects smashed and scattering, a single small black panel shot off and stabbed into the schoolyard in the distance before turning into an arm and rolling across the ground.

But that was it. The arm soon broke into an infinite number of polygon fragments, scattered, and disappeared.

“So he got away, then.” Kuroyukihime lowered her sword.

“Kuroyukihime!!” Haruyuki cried out and began to walk after her, staring at her too beautiful, too brave, and ephemeral form for a while.

He made his avatar—armor blown off its upper body, scarred with countless wounds—run earnestly. Hearing his footfalls, Kuroyukihime whirled around. He stopped before her and clenched both hands tightly.

“Kuroyukihime…Kuroyukihime…I…I…” He couldn’t say anything else.

She stared for a moment at the Gale Thruster, the Enhanced Armament fused with the wings glittering on his back. Her violet-blue eyes lit up and she nodded deeply. Raising the sword of her right hand, she patted Haruyuki’s shoulder with the blade’s ridge. “Well done. I’ll have you tell me the details after I return to Tokyo tomorrow. For now, rest and relax.”

She then shifted her gaze behind Haruyuki, where Cyan Pile and Lime Bell had also come to stand.

“Takumu, you fought well. Good job. And…Kurashima, or rather, Chiyuri.” Here, Kuroyukihime did something unexpected. Turning toward Lime Bell, she lowered her head.

However, the real surprise was the words that followed. “Thank you, really. If you hadn’t notified me, I wouldn’t have been able to run over here.”

“Wh—”

“What?!”

Haruyuki and Takumu cried out in surprise in unison.

“Y-you told her…Chiyu, you?! Kuroyukihime?!”

“I did!” Waving the bell of her left hand, Chiyuri shouted in her usual spirited way. “What did you think I came all the way over to your house for, huh? Obviously I came to set the actual fight time and tell Kuroyukihime!”

“Wh-whoa…H-hold on…” Groaning, Haruyuki worked hard to turn the gears of his exhausted brain.

After Haruyuki had sent Nomi the final postponement message immediately before diving into the Unlimited Neutral Field, he had indeed said, “Okay. We dive in one minute.”

The instant Chiyuri had heard that, she had pushed the SEND button on a message to Kuroyukihime that was already saved on her virtual desktop. Kuroyukihime, receiving it in Okinawa, had immediately dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field, captured a flying horse Enemy, and raced toward Tokyo for fifteen hours. So that was what happened.

Chiyuri kept going as Haruyuki and Takumu exchanged dumbfounded looks. “I was worried about leaving things to you two stubborn jerks, so I sent Kuroyukihime a mail when you decided on the final battle and told her everything. And then she told me she would run in the field, so I should fix the exact time. At your house, Haru, I was actually really annoyed! I just wanted you to pick a time already!!”

“S-sorry,” he muttered, and then he shook his head hard.

He turned to Kuroyukihime and lowered his head as deeply as he could. “Thank you so much. To take fifteen hours and come to help us…When I saw you on the roof, I was overwhelmed…I was so happy.”

“Maybe I put on too much of a show.” Kuroyukihime shrugged, and Haruyuki held back his tears to return her smile.

Next he looked at Chiyuri and lowered his head once more. “Thanks, Chiyu. If it had been just Taku and me, we totally would have lost. Thank you…so much.” His throat was blocked and his voice shook.

“Honestly.” Chiyuri’s own voice was also secretly damp. But his old friend continued in a more cheerful tone, “And I’m worried about it being just the two of you from now on, too. Guess I got no choice…I’ll join your Nega Nebulus.”

“Huh?!”

“Ch-Chi!”

Paying no further attention to the two boys, Chiyuri turned back to Kuroyukihime and tilted her head shyly. Kuroyukihime nodded decisively and did some quick operations on her Brain Burst console. Without the slightest hesitation, Chiyuri pressed the Legion entry application that popped up in her vision.

The two girl-type avatars, one jet-black, the other the color of fresh grass, took a step toward each other.

Sword and bell met with a ringing clang.

Haruyuki could only stare silently as Takumu’s muttering next to him reached his ears. “What were we so worried about?”

“Seriously. But…this is great. Really great…Really…” Haruyuki stretched out his arm unconsciously and clasped Cyan Pile’s shoulder.

Under the blue moonlight of the Accelerated World, the four Burst Linkers stood like this for a while.

Eventually, however, Kuroyukihime lifted her face and ordered her subordinates in a refreshingly clear voice, “Now. Go home. To the real world.”

They left the Unlimited Neutral Field through the portal at Koenji station, and Haruyuki returned to his own living room in the real world.

Although the final battle had gone from one unexpected development to the next, it hadn’t even taken a full hour altogether. In other words, on this side, it had all happened in a mere three seconds.

However, the instant he returned to his flesh-and-blood body, Haruyuki slumped over onto the table at the enormous sense of exhaustion he felt. Still, he managed to get it in check and lift his face. His blurry eyes focused on Chiyuri, similarly blinking rapidly.

For a mere instant, they exchanged glances. That alone made something hot well up in his heart, and his eyes started to blur dangerously again, so he hurried to open his mouth. “You could’ve told us.”

“Seriously,” Takumu said, bobbing his head up and down next to him. “If you had just told us that you contacted Master—no, wait, that you joined up with Nomi to get Haru’s wings back, we could’ve gotten through all this with a little less agony.”

The two boys were so full of self-reproach at having doubted their childhood friend, their voices were unintentionally resentful, and Chiyuri sighed deeply before responding with exasperation.

“Now, look! I told you before! I had one chance to rewind Dusk Taker’s time with Citron Call! So there was no way I could let Nomi get the slightest idea about what I was up to. I mean, I didn’t think he had, but what if Nomi had planted some eavesdropping app or device on me? The second I explained it all to you, the whole thing would be blown!”

Gulping, Haruyuki looked at Takumu, and then murmured in amazement, “Y-you thought that far ahead…even though it’s you—”

“Hey! What exactly is that supposed to mean?!” she shouted, and knocked her chair back as she stood with the intent to come around the table and punch him. But before she could, she fell back into her seat, exhausted, as though standing up had given her a head rush.

Haruyuki and Takumu hurriedly stood and dropped down in front of her.

“Ch-Chi! You okay?!” At Takumu’s voice, she nodded lightly, head still hanging.

“I worked really hard, you know,” Chiyuri whispered abruptly, tiny tremors in her voice.

Plip! A single droplet of water fell to the laminate floor.

“…It was so incredibly tough…but I kept trying. I worked so hard…”

Plip, plip. The drops falling one after another glittered beautifully like gems on the wood.

Pierced straight through, Haruyuki said gently in a voice that was definitely shaking, “Aah…thank you. Really, thanks, Chiyu.”

Heaving a large sob, Chiyuri lifted a face stained with tears and leapt at their necks. She yanked Takumu in on the left and Haruyuki on the right and pushed all of their heads together. “I love you…I love you both!!”

His childhood friend then began to cry like a child, loud and suffering, and Haruyuki squeezed her back tightly. He couldn’t maintain his own control then, and tears welled up in his eyes. Something shone on Takumu’s cheeks, too, under his glasses.

The three friends—born in the same year, raised in the same place—stayed like this, letting their tears flow.