2

Legs enveloped in silver armor landed on a thick, mossy branch. When he lifted his head, the scene had completely changed from the rainy skyscrapers of a moment before. The sky was a bizarre mauve, and all the tall buildings had been transformed into enormous, rough, and bony trees. Several thick ropes of ivy hung down among these, with a few pterosaur-like silhouettes flying leisurely among them.

Haruyuki looked down on the dense forest below from a branch near the terrifyingly high peak of what had been the Shinjuku Government Building. “Ugh,” he grumbled. “A Primeval Forest stage. I’m bad at these.”

“Why?” a voice next to him replied immediately. “It’s so pretty. It’s way better than some brutal map like a Wasteland or a Century End.” The owner of these words was, of course, Lime Bell, clad in translucent emerald-green armor. Round, cute eyes glittered beneath the brim of her large, triangular hat.

“Well, sure, at first glance, it looks fun. But, like, there’s too much stuff in the way when I fly, and I can’t see the ground at all in this place.”

“Quit whining! You have to practice fighting on the ground sometimes, too, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Haruyuki nodded as she slapped him on the back with the bell of her left hand.

The characteristics of the Primeval Forest stage were extremely poor field of view due to the thick plant growth, and a ridiculous number of small animal objects known as “critters.” Enormous carnivorous beasts also existed in this stage, and although they were few in number, duelers still needed to factor in their possible intervention when putting together battle strategies.

Reviewing the stage attributes in the back of his mind, Haruyuki glanced up to the right and checked the two HP gauges lined up there.

A two-person tag team had challenged them to this duel: the level-five Frost Horn and the level-four Tourmaline Shell, both active members of the Blue Legion, Leonids, and whose names Haruyuki knew only too well. Since he was currently level five and Chiyuri level four, there was no difference in terms of the numbers, but their opponents had likely become Burst Linkers a fair bit before them. Taking a simplistic view of the situation, they might be assumed to be better than Haruyuki and Chiyuri, who had leveled up fairly quickly, but in truth, that was not the case.

This was how it worked: Burst Linkers were broken up into several types based on personality. For instance, there were the daredevils who took no account of win ratios and pushed whomever they could into a duel whenever they could, wherever they were, and the more conservative Linkers who carefully weighed advantages and disadvantages and aimed for the stars within reach with duels they could win. Even if Burst Linkers from two such disparate groups were at the same numerical level, they differed greatly in an invisible way: accumulated battle experience.

When Linkers challenged a higher-ranking avatar they had no hope of beating no matter how they struggled, or an opponent whose avatar attributes they were not compatible with and would inevitably lose to, the duel gave the Burst Linker experience separate from the numerical points they might have won: battle techniques, knowledge, and above all else the heart to stand firm in a tight spot.

Naturally, the play style of the daredevil group was less effective than that of the clever group. From time to time, they would be pushed into anxiety about burst points and would occasionally have to apply themselves to hunting Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field. But his teacher, Kuroyukihime, told him that in the end, it was this type who had the higher likelihood of making it to the top levels. Thus, Haruyuki made a conscious effort not to be choosy about his opponents once he had made up his mind to duel and gone out into the city; his aim was to maintain a style somewhere in between the daredevils and the clever kids, but…

The pair who had challenged them now, in particular Frost Horn, was well known as go-for-broke guys, with a daredevil level far above Haruyuki’s. Which was exactly why they had not hesitated in the slightest to yank Haruyuki and Chiyuri into the Accelerated World immediately after they appeared on the matching list.

Noting from the movement of the guide cursor in the center of his vision that the enemy team was heading straight for the government building tree they were perched in, Haruyuki resolved to go along with his opponents’ style.

“Chiyu, you wanna just get down from here and get this over with quick and dirty?”

“Sure.” His partner grinned. “After all, if I can’t see you, I can’t heal you, and I’ve been practicing hand-to-hand combat lately, too!” She waved the bell of her left hand and smashed five or six of the hard-looking nuts hanging behind them.

Having been hit on the head by that bell in the past, Haruyuki unconsciously flinched before stretching a hand out to his partner. “All right, then how about we do a surprise attack from above!”

“Yeah!”

She offered her hand and he grabbed on to it before fearlessly stepping off the branch five hundred meters up in the air. They went into an upside-down free fall, aiming for the point indicated by the guide cursor, a spot in the hazy forest far below.

The cursor only gave a rough idea of the enemy’s bearing, however. Thus, the opposing team wouldn’t immediately realize that Haruyuki and Chiyuri were rapidly approaching directly above their heads. To make sure they used this bit of deception to their fullest advantage, Haruyuki delayed decelerating until the very last possible minute. The wind howled in his ears, and the ground approached with terrifying force. Although he was used to dives like this, he couldn’t stop himself from holding his breath.

But Chiyuri, diving right next to him at the same speed, didn’t even move her mouth to cry out; rather, her eyes shone with the thrill. She had some serious balls. Or maybe it wasn’t okay to use that word to describe a girl…

“Found them!” A sharp whisper interrupted his meandering thoughts. “Below that huge red flower!”

He quickly shifted his gaze and glimpsed a big shadow and a small shadow racing through the dense growth of tall Rafflesia-like plants. The one on the right with light blue heavy armor and enormous horns growing from his forehead and both shoulders was Frost Horn. To the left, clad in sharp bluish-green armor, was Tourmaline Shell.

“I’ll take the one on the right, you get the left. Hit ’em with everything you got,” he said, and got a firm nod in response.

The enemy should have already guessed that Haruyuki and Chiyuri were either on the ground or somewhere in the government building tree. However, in mere seconds, both sides would come into close range, and the cursors would disappear. They had to decelerate and get ready to attack immediately before that happened. Haruyuki opened both eyes wide and focused his entire being on calculating that timing.

“Here we go. Five seconds to deceleration—three, two, one, zero!” He clutched Chiyuri’s hand tightly, and on zero, he fully deployed the wings on his back.

To make the enemy mistakenly believe they were on the ground, Silver Crow hadn’t dared charge up his special-attack gauge. Thus, no thrust came from his wings, but he was able to use them like a parachute. The metal fins caught on the air and put the brakes hard on their descent. Using the deceleration force to turn them around, he stretched out his left leg and assumed a diving-kick stance. Chiyuri did the same, tugging slightly on his hand, and adjusted her sights. The guide cursor then vanished from his field of view.

In that instant, the enemy tag team realized that Haruyuki and Chiyuri were unexpectedly close and stopped so abruptly that they dug grooves out of the earth. After quickly glancing around at their surroundings, they threw their heads back up at the sky.

But they were too late.

“Yaaaaaaah!”

“Hooooooo!”

Together with these battle cries, Haruyuki with his left foot and Chiyuri with her right kicked through the Rafflesia petals and plunged down onto their respective targets at an acute angle.

The timing was such that even these skilled fighters couldn’t evade the strike free of injury. Frost Horn and Tourmaline Shell both crossed their arms in front of their bodies and braced themselves to block. Nonetheless, they were concussed by dive kicks storing up the kinetic energy of a descent from a height of five hundred meters.

A splashy light effect and a crashing noise filled the stage, as if a special attack had hit its mark.

“Mngh!”

“Hrrnk!”

Cries slipped from Horn and Shell as they hunkered down and fought to deflect the blow. Their feet gouged into the green earth, carving out four deep ruts. But no matter how large they were, it was impossible to completely guard against such a powerful attack.

The struggle for supremacy broke in a mere second: Horn and his partner were simultaneously thrown backward. Still digging deeply into the ground, they skidded back, only to crash into a large tree trunk far, far away. The impact effect shook the stage once again, and the health gauges in the top right sank almost 30 percent.

Having succeeded in making the first strike, Haruyuki and Chiyuri landed on the ground via a backward somersault, and several voices cried out in the distance.

These shouts—“Oh, wow!” “You almost never see that kind of damage with a normal attack!”—were those of the Gallery, sitting in twos and threes in branches high above, looking down at the battle zone. Despite the fact that it was a weekday, there looked to be more than twenty people gathered there—unsurprising given Shinjuku’s status as a duel mecca.

As the excitement died down a little, Frost Horn and Tourmaline Shell—knocked over backward, legs popping up out of the shrubbery—now leapt to their feet. They staggered slightly with the aftereffects of the damage they had taken, but they found their footing quickly enough and started shouting loudly in turn.

“Dammit! You were up on the observation deck! I bet you couldn’t see anything at all! I mean, raining like that!”

“That’s not the point, Horn! It’s a date, get it? These two were on a date, Hoooorn!”

“Wh-wh-what…So they figured on a date, might as well duel…?!”

“That’s exactly it, Horn! They think they’re gonna take us down and then be all hugs and kisses, Hoooooooooorn!!”

“U-unforgivable, Tori! Burst Linkers like this need to be wiped oooouuuut!”

This skit appeared for all intents and purposes to have been prepared in advance, and the Gallery around them flared to life once again. Mixed in with the explosions of laughter came one-sided comments like, “That’s right, that’s right,” and, “Show ’em what the loveless are made of.”

Listening to this exchange dazed Haruyuki, and he shook his head fiercely back and forth. “N-no, that’s not— I mean, a date or—”

“If you’re so butt-hurt about it, maybe you should team up with a girl, too!” Chiyuri cried out as if to pour fuel on the fire, drowning out Haruyuki’s stammered objections.

“Y-you don’t pull punches.” Frost Horn reeled back, unsteady once more.

“Yup, yup.” Hands on hips, Tourmaline Shell bobbed his head in agreement. “We don’t have a lot of girl Linkers in our Legion. I mean, just the idea of a group of close-range fighters stinks of sweat.”

“This isn’t the time for patting each other on the back! We’re all here; we gotta beat them back and make the road home for these two a little awkward at least!!”

“Whoa! That’s, like, seriously amazing, Hoooorn!”

“Shut up! We’ll show them how a real man lives! Here we go…”

As Haruyuki stared dumbly at their little sideshow, Frost Horn suddenly readied his thick arms at his sides. The hard horns growing from his forehead and shoulders took on an intense light.

“Frosted Circle!!” He shouted the name of the attack, causing rings of bluish-white light to race outward with a whoosh. They pushed through Haruyuki and Chiyuri, and then scattered off behind them.

The speed and range were such that they couldn’t evade the attack, but the light itself was harmless. Their gauges didn’t move a pixel.

However, Haruyuki braced himself anew and waited for the phenomenon that would follow. He had fought Frost Horn several times in the Territories, but this was the first time he had been hit with this special attack directly. He was pretty sure that rather than causing direct damage to the enemy, the attack changed the properties applied to the area.

Cling, cling! Accompanying the sharp sound, the plants around them started to take on a whitish hue. Particles of light glittered in the air—they were all Frost. Crystallized water adhered to any and all objects, clothing them in a costume of ice.

Silver Crow’s smooth, mirrored armor clouded at once. “Bell, I’ll take Horn,” Haruyuki said in a low voice as he watched a fairly thick layer of frost descend on his limbs and the extremities of his armor. “Keep Shell in check until I finish him off.”

“Okay.” Immediately after this short reply—

“Waa…aaaaah!”

A throaty roar echoed from the other side of the veil of frost, and an enormous shadow came charging straight at him. Frost Horn. Just like Haruyuki, his light blue armor was caked in frost. The horns on his forehead and shoulders appeared to be covered in an especially thick layer of ice.

He came at Haruyuki with a vicious shoulder tackle, right shoulder thrust far out. Haruyuki dropped his stance, opened his eyes wide, and watched for the moment to dodge and counterattack.

“Haah!” He flew to the right and to avoid being hit.

But his body was a fair bit heavier than usual because of the frost clinging to it, and his start was slow. It wasn’t a direct hit, but the horn scraped him, and he felt the crunch of impact in his left shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Haruyuki held his ground, turned toward Horn as he slid past, and threw his right fist into his opponent’s flank.

But this time, too, his timing was off because of the added weight. Covered in the dense frost, Haruyuki’s short, straight punch would have caused greater damage than normal if it had hit the mark, but that force stopped at a mere light grazing of Horn’s body.

This was the main effect of the special attack Frosted Circle. It increased the weight of the extremities of any duel avatar within range, interfering with small, swift attacks and serial attacks. Conversely, large, one-shot attacks became more powerful. It also had secondary effects: because Frosted Circle made it extremely difficult to see any distance, it effectively prevented getting distance for a sniper attack, and, because of the cold, it rendered thermal homing useless.

In other words, it forced nearly every type of avatar within the area into a fierce struggle, making it a fearsome ability in a variety of ways. Even if an avatar tried to move outside of the range of the effect, the frost was generated over a broad swath with Horn at its center, so running away was no easy feat.

Haruyuki glared at the shadow of Horn turning around in the distance and readying himself for another charge using his horns. All right, he murmured to himself. I’ll dance with you.

While he was firming his fists and fighting spirit, he glanced over at the other pair of avatars facing off not far away.

His partner Lime Bell was similarly frozen white. The bell of her left hand, in particular, looked very heavy, with several icicles hanging off it.

But…

Tourmaline Shell didn’t have a single particle of frost sticking to any part of him. The smooth, curved armor covering his slender body was unchanged from the start of the duel, glittering an almost wet bluish-green color. No—it actually was wet. The ice that tried to coil around him melted the instant it touched him and turned into drops of water.

This was the reason Tourmaline Shell and Frost Horn liked teaming up together.

When struck by anything, that tourmaline gem-colored armor took on an electric charge and generated heat. And although there were many electric-and heat-type avatars, there weren’t too many who continuously generated heat. Shell was one of a very few avatars on whom Horn’s special attack had absolutely no effect.

Tourmaline Shell readied sword hands, thin sparks crackling as they crawled along his arms, and came after Lime Bell in a single fluid movement. He launched one close-range attack after another with flat-handed strikes straight out of Chinese kenpo. Bell was blocking solidly, her large bell raised up in place of a shield.

Being a fairly high-saturation green, Lime Bell had a defensive ability that blew metal colors out of the water. On top of that, the thick frost covering her arms seemed to be blocking almost all damage from Shell’s Electric Heat Palm. As long as she focused on blocking, she would be able to essentially maintain her HP.

However, the enemy tag team was no doubt expecting exactly this.

Horn and his partner naturally knew that Lime Bell was a Healer, extremely rare in the Accelerated World. In a duel like this, where both teams had an identical total level, if one team used the healing ability even just once, the possibility of defeat for the other team spiked.

Thus, they had come up with the battle strategy of Shell, who was able to move around freely within the range of Frosted Circle, keeping Bell occupied with successive, cutting blows while Horn took care of Crow. Although Haruyuki and Chiyuri had succeeded in attacking first, the duel since they had descended had proceeded exactly according to the enemy’s plan.

To break out of this deadlock, Haruyuki had no choice but to defeat Horn without backup. But I knew that the minute I decided to fight a close-range battle on the ground!

Haruyuki brought his transient thoughts to an end with this shout and focused his awareness on the shadow of Frost Horn charging.

In the earlier confusion, he had physically experienced the added weight of the frost sticking to him. He should be able to just barely dodge this next onslaught and offer up a counterattack.

Horn had his left shoulder forward this time, horn readied low like a battering ram. Haruyuki swallowed his fear and stood his ground as bait.

Now!

The instant he went to kick at the ground the slightest bit sooner than usual to avoid the hit, the tip of the sharp horn slammed into Haruyuki’s left shoulder.

“Aaah!”

Crying out involuntarily, he went flying helplessly. Spinning, he crashed into the ground but didn’t stop there; instead, he bounced back, high up. If he fell again from there, he’d take extra damage, and so Haruyuki somehow managed to pull off a landing on both feet to avoid that damage penalty, if nothing else.

That said, at just a single blow from the spike, Haruyuki’s health gauge had been depleted by nearly 20 percent. A deep indentation had been gouged out of the armor of his left shoulder, and sparks snapped and cracked as they scattered. That particular pain of serious localized damage raced along his nerves, but more than that, Haruyuki felt an enormous surprise.

His timing should have been perfect. Why had the horn attack—which had to be much slower than a bullet—hit him so dead-on?

The answer was revealed by Frost Horn, standing imposingly a little ways off.

“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Surprised you, huh, birdman! You’re always flying around up in the sky, so you wouldn’t know, but you see these stylish horns little me’s carrying around? The longer they’re in the Frosted Circle, the longer they get! They stand all sturdy and tall, right!”

“…Wh-what…” Gaping, he stared hard and saw that the cone-shaped horns stretching out from the large blue avatar’s shoulders and forehead, encased in a thick ice, were indeed a fair bit longer than they had been at the start of the battle. And they were getting bigger with each passing second even at that moment. In other words, he could learn the timing after taking any number of tackle attacks, and it would still be pointless.

“Whaddya think?! This is! A real man’s! Weapon! Ah-ha-ha! Haaaa!”

At Horn’s high-pitched laughter, cheers of “Hear! Hear!” and interjections like “That’s just rude” poured down from the members of the surrounding Gallery.

Haruyuki took a deep breath and expelled it again as he listened to them.

I made a mistake somewhere along the way here.

Fighting recklessly without choosing my opponent looks kind of like tearing down my own style to push myself into a fight, but they’re not the same. Thinking I could win on my opponent’s turf without any kind of strategy at all is exactly the same as sneering at my opponent. When facing an enemy, I should be digging out everything I have and fighting for real right from the start. And if I don’t do that, there’s really no reason why I should have a chance of winning.

I’m going full throttle starting now!

Haruyuki made fists of both hands and thrust them out to deploy the wings on his back. With the damage they’d done at the start and the hits he’d taken, his special-attack gauge was nearly half full. He’d get Chiyuri to heal them and then they’d flee to the sky. They could wait there for the Frosted Circle to be released before attacking with another double super dive to crush Tourmaline Shell first—

“Geh!” In the middle of plotting out his strategy in his mind, something unexpected happened.

His wings didn’t open.

He immediately peered around at his back and saw the thick frost clinging to the metallic fins folded up there. It must have been acting as an adhesive to prevent them from deploying.

Hurriedly, he brought his hands around to his back and tried to rub the frost off, while Horn watched.

“Whoa! What?!” he cried. “Serious chance! Aaaawesome!” Dropping his hips, he readied the remarkably large horn on his forehead and positioned himself for a dash forward.

With the shoulder tackle, Frost Horn had already shaved away 20 percent of Haruyuki’s gauge. The forehead was apparently the main attraction; he absolutely could not get slammed with it. That said, if he abandoned the idea of a counterattack and just focused on running around, the situation would only get worse. He had to do something, something, anything—

“Heeeyah!!” A forceful battle cry echoed through the stage.

Glancing over, he took in the sight of Lime Bell catching Tourmaline Shell’s chopping attack with her right hand and sending him flying with a magnificent one-armed throw.

Set free with a pop, Shell crashed on his back nearly ten meters away from her. However, frustratingly, in a stage like the Primeval Forest, where the ground below was grass or sand, throwing techniques had little effect. The bluish-green avatar sustained no significant damage and was ready to bounce back onto his feet right away.

But it seemed Chiyuri had had something else in mind with the one-armed throw.

She whirled around without so much as a glance at where her opponent had landed and brought the large bell of her left hand high up into the air while shouting, “Citron Caaaaaaall!!”

The bell came back down with a twirling flourish, and the lime green light that gushed from it, accompanied by a beautiful ringing, advanced in a straight line toward Haruyuki.

And passed immediately by his left arm to disappear futilely in the frost behind him.

“Wha…” Haruyuki’s dumbfounded voice was overwritten by Frost Horn’s high-pitched laughter.

“A-ha-ha! In the Circle, like, light techniques have a hit rate thirty percent lower, you know! If you’re a real man! Fight! Mano a manoooooo!!”

Whk! White frost danced up around Horn’s feet. He pushed off hard to plunge ferociously forward at Haruyuki. The long, large horn on his forehead glittered.

Haruyuki racked his brains frantically in that brief instant of the enemy closing in on him.

However poor her field of view might have been, had Chiyuri actually missed with her special attack there?

She was the serious type when it came to things like that. If she was going to use her healing ability, she would wait for a time until she was sure of success. And more than that, Haruyuki’s health gauge was still down by only 20 percent. It was too soon to pull out Citron Call, given the poor mileage it got.

Which meant that Chiyuri had meant to miss, or rather she had been aiming at something that wasn’t Silver Crow.

And the element other than the duelers that was able to move around in the battle in this Primeval Forest stage was…

The instant his thoughts reached this point, Haruyuki’s eyelids flew back and he understood exactly what he had to do. He waited for Frost Horn’s charge, dropping into a martial arts stance with one foot forward, and calculated the direction he should dodge in.

“Waa…Ngyaaah!”

Haruyuki pretended to be overawed at this throaty howl from Horn, turned, and ran with all his might to his left, perfectly tracing out the line Chiyuri’s special attack had drawn earlier. From behind, a subterranean rumbling closed in on him, and he was bursting with the foreboding of damage ripping into his back.

After braking urgently and abruptly, he faced straight up and kicked at the ground with every ounce of his strength. He spread his arms out, bent his back, and flew past Horn in a backward somersault in order to come at him from behind.

His enemy believed Silver Crow couldn’t use his wings. So he shouldn’t be expecting Haruyuki to dodge upward. And sure enough, although he felt the sharp tip scrape the center of his back, Haruyuki danced through the air, taking no more of a hit than that.

The large avatar charged forward in a straight line in Haruyuki’s reversed view of the world. Ahead, in the dancing curtain of white frost, an enormous elliptical shadow floated up.

“Whaaoo?!”

The cry came from Frost Horn. He flapped both hands and tried putting the brakes on his charge. But because his feet were half frozen, he wasn’t able to stop immediately. Sending spectacular amounts of frost flying, he plunged straight into the round shadow.

Krrshk! The dry and yet somehow wet sound of destruction rang through the air.

The enormous ellipse broke into large pieces, and a transparent viscous fluid poured out. The something that crawled out from inside gave an angry cry, a greee to send chills down the spine.

It was an enormous creature object, the sort you always had to be watching out for in a Primeval Forest stage. There were many different kinds—carnivorous beasts and dinosaurs and even predatory plants—but as a general rule, no matter what type of creature it was, it would attack any duel avatar who entered its sights without discrimination.

The sole exception to this was when its egg was broken.

Disturbed in its peaceful sleep inside the eggshell, the large creature would single-mindedly hunt the avatar who had done the deed for a full five hundred seconds, which was well over eight minutes. At that moment, an enormous long-horned beetle looked down on Frost Horn, its four eyes shining red as it clacked its large and sturdy jaw.

As exasperated voices from the Gallery—“Aah, now he’s done it”—rained down, Horn threw up both hands and started to talk to the carapaced creature.

“W-w-w-wait! If we just talk about this man-to-man, I know we can figure it out!”

“Gree gree greeee!!”

Unfortunately, it appeared to be female. Mowing down the surrounding Rafflesia with its large feelers, the long-horned beetle began to chase the avatar, which was half its size. As Horn shrieked and struggled with which way to flee, the large jaws snapped at the air above his head—klak klak—several times.

Naturally, the giant creature eggs that could spawn such terror didn’t exist just anywhere. Even if you wanted to incorporate them into your battle strategy, you could spend your whole time in the duel searching intently and never find even one.

But this one time at least, it wasn’t by accident that the egg rolled along.

Chiyuri had made it. In the midst of the duel, she had noticed the shadow of the enormous insect moving on the other side of the frost. And then she had released her special attack, making it look like she was aiming at Haruyuki, but actually targeting the insect.

In truth, Citron Call was not a healing ability; it was the power to rewind time for its target. It recovered the health gauge as a sort of pseudohealing, but it would also cancel out things like changes in Enhanced Armaments, and if it hit any stage objects, it would set their status back as well. Destroyed items were returned to their original state; giant long-horned beetles reverted to eggs.

Obviously, in the normal course of things, Frost Horn would have realized something was up and never approached the egg. But the frost drifting thickly through the air blocked vision and hid Chiyuri’s target. As a result, Frost Horn followed Haruyuki’s invitation and charged right into the egg.

“Eeeeeaaaaaah!!”

The shrill scream of the man and the angry cry of the giant bug receded deep into the western woods, in the direction of Shinjuku Central Park. The Frosted Circle went with them, and their surroundings soon enough returned to the original brightness.

Tourmaline Shell stared dumbfounded at his partner’s flight before turning back with a gasp and resting his eyes on Haruyuki and Chiyuri in turn. “I’ll get vengeance on Horn’s behalf! C-come and get meeeee!!”

And, of course, they did.

“Nice work!”

Beaming, Chiyuri thrust her right fist forward and Haruyuki bumped it with his own before sliding slowly onto one of the benches lined up in the hallway of the top floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. He let out a long sigh and, after disconnecting from the global net for the time being, turned a dazed face out at space.

It wasn’t as though anything other than burst points had been at stake; they had just finished a normal duel, but he was ridiculously tired somehow. It was probably because he had pushed himself into intense hand-to-hand ground combat, a way of fighting so unlike his usual style.

Honestly, the stress of not being able to fly was like having no water in the desert, despite the fact that around the beginning of the first term there had been a period where he couldn’t use his wings for more than a week. Yet that experience seemed to have just increased his yearning for flight all the more.

And that’s how it was for Haruyuki, who was still only in his first year as a Burst Linker. So for her, having been in this world for more than six years, it was no wonder she burned with a nearly mad passion for the sky. Although it was impossible to even get a sense of this fire from her normal calm demeanor…

“Hey! What are you spacing out about?”

Bopped on the head, Haruyuki hurriedly blinked several times in quick succession.

Chiyuri, next to him on the bench, had her cheeks puffed out and was glaring at him sideways. Apparently, she had started talking to him, and he had just let it slip right by.

“S-sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked you if you wanna go one more time!”

He looked at the clock display in the lower right of his field of view: Only a few minutes had passed since they’d come up to the observation deck. This was par for the course given that a Burst Linker duel ended in at most a mere 1.8 seconds in the real world, but Haruyuki thought about it for a moment before replying. “Hmm, I kinda think that if we stay here and wait for another fight, it’s just gonna be Horn and Shell again, y’know? But I guess that’s fine, too.”

Rolling her cat-shaped eyes exaggeratedly, Chiyuri also shook her head. “Yeah, going up against the same team would be kinda boring. But, like, we came all this way together; it seems like a waste to just do solo fights.”

If she had been in her in-school local net avatar, she would’ve been twitching her large cat ears. Or at least that was the look on her face as she fell into thought. “Oh! I’ve got it!” She abruptly clapped her hands together. “We’re right here in Shinjuku—let’s call my big sister! She’s at a high school in Shibuya, right? It’s just one station, maybe she’d come.”

Haruyuki was the tiniest bit surprised. Because the “big sister” Chiyuri was talking about was the same “her” who had popped into Haruyuki’s mind earlier.

Her name was Sky Raker. A senior Burst Linker and old friend of Kuroyukihime who had joined—or rather returned to—Nega Nebulus just two months before.

The reason why Chiyuri called this Burst Linker her “big sis” was exceedingly simple. Chiyuri’s last name was Kurashima, the “shima” of which meant “island,” while Raker’s real name was Fuko Kurasaki, the “saki” of which meant “peninsula.” When they exchanged name tags at their first face-to-face meeting in the real, Haruyuki had casually made the offhand comment, “Shima and saki together. You must be long-lost sisters, huh? Ha-ha-ha!” And that was where that started.

Without waiting for Haruyuki’s response, Chiyuri started typing out a mail to this elder “sister,” inviting her to join them. As his childhood friend pecked at her holokeyboard somewhat awkwardly, Haruyuki struggled with whether or not to tell her to stop. Because he had the feeling first and foremost that Raker would definitely decline the invitation.

Although she had in fact returned to the Legion, Sky Raker had not been released from the criminal consciousness that bound her. To that very day, she deeply regretted how, long, long ago, she had left the Legion in such a way as to abandon her leader, Kuroyukihime. Chiyuri, of course, also knew about all of this. She was most likely trying in her own way to knock on the locked door to Raker’s heart.

Which is why Haruyuki once again closed the mouth he had opened.

A few seconds later, when Chiyuri had finished typing out the mail, she connected her Neurolinker to the global net for an instant to send it. She disconnected again, waited for a bit, and then connected once more. After getting Raker’s reply and cutting free from the network one last time, she glanced over the text of it.

“…She says sorry,” Chiyuri murmured, lifting her face and smiling slightly, and Haruyuki offered the words he had readied.

“Raker’s in high school and all; she has to be superbusy on weekdays. She’s supposed to be in the Territories this weekend. We’ll see her then.”

“…Yeah, you’re right.” His childhood friend heaved a sigh before smiling broadly, as if changing emotional gears. She said in an abruptly spirited voice, “So, okay, how about we fight solo once apiece?”

“Hmm, I kinda feel satisfied with that fight before. But if you’re still wanting to go, I’ll totally join you, of course.”

At this response, Chiyuri nodded, a happy look coming to her face, this time from her heart. “Okay. We got to have a fun, cool win, so I’m good for today, too. Aah, that really did feel great!”

“Yeah, I guess.” He returned her smile and reflected on the earlier tag-team match.

He was quite pleased at simply having won in a contest of strength, avatar to avatar, but more exhilarating than that was that it had been a strategic victory, where they’d taken full advantage of the characteristics of the stage. Not to mention that that kind of upset victory—turning around a bad situation—almost never happened. The eruption of the Gallery when the battle had been decided was proof of that.

Of course, this did make the regret of the side taking the hit all that much worse.

Frost Horn somehow managed to shake free of the hot pursuit of the enormous long-horned beetle and return to the battlefield, only to face a concentrated attack in short order. And almost as if Chiyuri had also remembered Frost Horn’s magnificent parting words at the same time as Haruyuki, they both spurted with laughter.

“Pft, heh-heh! ‘Next time, we’ll be the ones dropping on you! From the top of Tokyo Skytree to kick you in the heads!’ We’d totally see it coming and step aside, and then they’d crash into the ground like that, game over.”

“But, no, wait, even before that, how’re they gonna get up there? It’s like two hundred meters from the observation deck to the antenna at the very top, and to begin with, are there even social cameras…that high up…” As he spoke, a thought abruptly flashed up in the back of his mind and Haruyuki’s mouth decelerated.

The thing he had been trying to remember right before they were challenged to the duel…The bit about the first export of the social camera technology outside of Japan. The memory of something he had caught only a glimpse of in the headline news finally came back to him.

Chiyuri cocked her head to one side at Haruyuki’s sudden silence. “What’s wrong, Haru?”

“Oh, uh, n-no, it’s nothing.” He shook his head vigorously, and Chiyuri shrugged before leaping to her feet.

“Okay, then! Let’s get tea somewhere before heading home. It’s all sunshine for you, huh, Professor Arita?! You’re not stuck with me all awkward on the way home after losing pathetically!”

He could talk about games forever, but this type of line never failed to make his brain flicker.

“N-no, it’d be fine. I mean, I don’t care about losing. It’s fine. Really,” he mumbled awkwardly.

Chiyuri had already started walking toward the elevator, and her laughter glided through the air to his ears. Sighing, he hurried to catch up with her.

Outside the windows, white clouds kept up their constant flow.