6

After bursting out to the real world from the Territory battlefield, Haruyuki hesitated to open his eyes for a while, feeling the pull of gravity on his entire body. He sat like this for nearly ten seconds, but finally, slowly, he lifted his face.

The living room at six o’clock in the evening had fallen back into a silence so deep that he could almost believe that the conversation and laughter exchanged only moments before on the other side had been a hallucination.

The lights were low, so it was fairly dim. The evening sky he could see through the narrow gap in the curtains had sunk into a dull, leaden color. The only movement in his field of view was the apathetic march of the thin second hand of the analog clock hung on the wall, essentially serving nothing more than a decorative purpose.

Sighing lightly from his position on the sofa, Haruyuki flopped over onto his side.

They did try insofar as it was possible to meet in the real before diving for the Territories each Saturday. But when they didn’t have that luxury, they joined in the battles from their various locations, such as individually in their houses or from other parts of town. Although a single fight in Brain Burst was over in a mere 1.8 seconds in the real, defense of a Territory took a succession of ten battles at minimum, so it took up nearly ten minutes, breaks in between fights and the like included. Today, Kuroyukihime hadn’t really been able to get away from the student council office, and so she ended up diving separately. And, of course, given that her house was very near the border with Shibuya Ward, Sky Raker took part from a distance nearly every week.

Haruyuki couldn’t seem to come to terms with fighting in the Territories by himself from his house. The reason was simple: He would make it through ten or more successive and heated battles as if in a dream, and then share the thrill of victory or the bitterness of defeat with his companions, only to burst out and wake up suddenly alone in an empty house; it made him feel a pitiless loneliness.

Until he met Kuroyukihime in the fall of last year and received the Brain Burst program, he had never felt lonely being alone. On the contrary, he had felt more comfortable that way. Every day, almost before classes were over, he was flying out the school gates as if to escape when heading home, where he would hole up in his room and throw himself into the world of games and anime and comics. Having a conversation with someone in the real world—just being in the same place as someone else was agony. Even if that someone else was Chiyuri or Takumu.

A mere eight months.

That’s still all the time that had gone by since he became a Burst Linker. And yet now, Haruyuki felt from the bottom of his heart that he wanted to see his friends from the Legion he had only just said good-bye to. And it didn’t matter if it was Niko or Pard or Ash Roller or even Frost Horn. He wanted to exchange blows in a duel, to clamor with criticism over a battle as a member of the Gallery, to meet someone in the real and talk about nothing.

“What happened to me?” he muttered, burying his face in a cushion.

At that moment, a window of some kind started to open in the center of his vision, together with the default sound effect of his home net, and he slapped the confirm button, without bothering to look at what the window said. After all, it was probably just the usual message from his mother about how she was going to be late that night. He promptly forgot about it as words in this vein continued to pop up in his mind.

Have I gotten stronger? Or weaker?

He supposed you could say that the fact that his fear of other people had decreased meant he was stronger. But at the same time, his dependence on other people had also increased.

Back when he was alone every day, he had nothing to lose. But now, Haruyuki was deeply terrified of destroying the modest personal relationships he had managed to develop over the last eight months. In particular, the lone thread of black silk tied tightest in the depths of his heart that stretched straight up, glittering all the while—

Even though he knew this line of thinking was dangerous, he couldn’t stop. Lying facedown on the sofa in the dim living room, he squeezed his eyes shut and kept thinking, bringing his arms up around his head.

Naturally, the end of that thread was connected to the person who had saved him, his “parent,” Kuroyukihime.

She was currently in ninth grade at Umesato Junior High. And the first term of that school year was already half over. Which meant there were just ten months left. Once a mere three hundred days passed, Kuroyukihime would graduate from Umesato. He hadn’t asked her anything about where she would go to high school. He was afraid to ask.

Real-world time, passing bit by tiny bit in that moment as well, felt to Haruyuki like a raging river flowing at a speed a thousand times faster than normal. If it were possible, he wanted to spend all of their remaining ten months together in the Accelerated World. By a rough calculation, an amount of time equivalent to the infinity of eight hundred and twenty years would pass on the other side, but he felt that even that would most certainly not be enough.

“Kuroyukihime,” he murmured out loud, squeezing the edge of the cushion.

“Hmm? What?”

He felt like he heard a voice coming from right beside him. Still facedown, Haruyuki repeated her name in an attempt to hear once again the reply of the phantom girl.

“Kuroyukihime.”

“And I said ‘what,’ Haruyuki?”

That voice included a gentleness and a doubt that was simply too real. Haruyuki, realizing that he had pushed himself to the limits of his own delusional imagination, rolled over toward the left.

And found before his eyes, a mere fifty centimeters or so away from the sofa, two legs wrapped in black stockings.

His eyes fluttered open and shut before he vacantly lifted his gaze. Skirt at the perfect above-knee length. Jet-black short-sleeved shirt with a soft brilliance. A deep red ribbon. From the slender neck equipped with a piano-black Neurolinker to the silky, flowing lengths of hair to the pale face possessing a somehow inhuman beauty, currently cocked to one side, a vision with overwhelming reality filled Haruyuki’s field of view.

Man, I really can’t underestimate my imagination. I mean, a vision so clear like this. Maybe I put it together with image data in my memory without realizing it. But do I have a full-body shot with this kind of high resolution…Haruyuki nonchalantly stretched out his right hand, grabbed the hem of the pleated skirt, and tugged at it.

Even the unbearably real sensations of the texture of the fabric and the mass and flexibility of the person beyond it were communicated to his fingers, and just as he started to wonder—

“Whaaa?!” He heard a cry of that nature and his hand was slapped away. Followed by: “Wh-wh-what are you doing, you idiot?!”

The roared rebuke poured down over him, and at the same time, a slender hand reached out and grabbed his cheek with three fingers to demonstrate their merciless pulling power.

“Hya…Haah?!” As he uttered this squeal/cry of surprise, Haruyuki understood.

She was real. She was not a hallucination, nor a photo, nor a 3-D artificial reality image. The genuine article, Kuroyukihime herself, had suddenly appeared in Haruyuki’s own living room, her beautiful eyebrows arched into a V. But why? How? Maybe she’d teleported? Electron coherence—?

Half a minute later, Kuroyukihime, having stretched out Haruyuki’s cheek to a point where she was satisfied, flopped back onto the opposite sofa and revealed her secrets.

“Look here! I very clearly rang the bell and everything! And then you—without even saying so much as the h of hello—unlocked the door, so having no other choice, I simply showed myself in. I called out in my actual voice from the entryway, you know!”

“Oh!”

A window had in fact opened up while he was thinking about the stuff with his face buried in the pillow and his ears blocked by his arms. He had just assumed it was a mail from his mother and pressed the confirmation button without even looking at the text. But that window had actually been to notify him of the intercom call.

It was his own fault for leaving the messaging noise set to its default, which sounded very similar to the intercom buzzer, and after making a note to himself in his internal memory not to forget to change that, Haruyuki sat up straight and opened his mouth again.

“Uh, ummm. I-it’s good to see you.”

“Mmm. Here I am,” Kuroyukihime replied, her lips still slightly pointed as she tugged down the hem of her skirt. It was a good thing he had pulled it toward him earlier. If he had tried to flip it up or something, he had no doubt he would definitely not have gotten off as lightly as a stretched-out cheek.

After this thought drifted through his head, Haruyuki realized that the gears of his brain had once again wandered into strange territory. And that wasn’t the issue anyway, it wasn’t about how Kuroyukihime had gotten into the house. The fundamental issue to be clarified straightaway—

“R-right, anyway, um. Why did you come all of a sudden?” He timidly gave voice to the question.

Judging from the fact that she was still in her school uniform and her school-specified bag was on the floor, Kuroyukihime had apparently come directly from Umesato JH. If she had something she needed to tell him, she could have done so in the meeting earlier where they reflected on how the Territories had gone. She could’ve mailed or called, too. So it was something for which none of that would suffice.

“It’s something that requires an incredibly high level of security…Is that it?” he added, attempting to get a jump on the situation, but Kuroyukihime cocked her head slightly and shrugged.

“No, not particularly…What? I don’t have the right to ever-so-occasionally come and hang out? Even though it appears that Takumu and Chiyuri visit rather frequently?”

She started to puff her cheeks out once more, so Haruyuki moved his head back and forth in the horizontal direction at top speed.

“N-no, no, no, no, not at all! I-I-I-I’m really happy. Superhappy. I wouldn’t say anything if you were here every day, or even if you went ahead and moved right in. Oh! R-r-right, I’m sorry, I should offer you something! I’ll make some coffee right away; please sit down. Or I guess you’re already sitting down! Sorry!”

If he kept chattering like this, he was bound to say something he couldn’t take back, so he practically fell off the sofa onto his feet and escaped in a dash to the kitchen. A “No need to bother” mixed with an exasperated-seeming smile chased him, and his nervousness abated slightly.

It wasn’t any top secret Legion thing; she had just stopped by to hang out on her way home from school. As a regular junior high student, doing the sort of thing classmates often did.

The moment this thought crossed his mind, a laugh threatened to slip out of his mouth, and he had to work hard to keep it in as he pulled out the most expensive-looking bag of coffee beans from his mother’s collection in the cupboard and poured them into the percolator.

During the time that the cloudy sky beyond the window went from the color of lead to the black ink of night, Haruyuki chatted away as if in a dream. About the Territories that day. About recent events in the Accelerated World. About the race the next day.

And he didn’t leave it at topics related to Brain Burst; he chattered and talked and babbled about happenings and rumors at school, local Suginami issues, and even the 2047 summer models announced by the various Neurolinker companies.

“…But I think the large, high-performance Neurolinkers lately have gotten things essentially backward, you know? Like, they should be machines developed with wearability in mind, to the point where you can forget you even have one on. And yet the new Hitasu models coming out, I mean, an external unit for carrying around comes with them, standard!”

“Heh-heh, I understand how you feel. But I wonder if you can actually say that after seeing the specs. According to rumor, by moving the connection and slots to the external unit, they’ve managed to equip those Linkers with a console-line CPU, you know.”

“Oh!…N-no, but no matter how great the CPU is, it’s not like it’ll give you an advantage or anything in Brain Burst, right?”

“Mmm, now that you mention it, I suppose not. But I have heard that using the latest Linkers makes the effects processing just a little more gorgeous.”

“Seriously?! No fair, that’s no fair!”

“What? It’s not as if a beautiful appearance raises your win rate. Incidentally, I’m planning to switch to the new Rekto model next month.”

“Whoa! No fair! That’s way unfair! K-Kuroyukihime, let me try it—”

“Come come, you can’t use another person’s Linker. And even if you could, I feel like it wouldn’t fit your neck anyway. Ha-ha-ha…”

It was fun.

Just thinking about having Kuroyukihime all to himself, sitting on the sofa across from him, coffee cup in one hand, talking, nodding, and laughing, Haruyuki experienced a delight such that he nearly ascended to Heaven.

A face-to-face conversation in the real world with real voices was quite the luxury in the current age, and Haruyuki relished this style of communication, which half a year earlier he would have been too nervous to carry out satisfactorily. Which is why he didn’t realize a certain something: the fact that every so often, the faintest hint of sorrow would bleed into Kuroyukihime’s eyes.

Approximately two hours later:

Interrupting this time, which he wished could go on forever, was a low rumbling from Haruyuki’s stomach area.

“Whoops! Is it already that time? I’ve stayed far too long. It’s already suppertime.”

“N-no!” Haruyuki hurriedly shook his head back and forth. “It’s totally fine! I’m not even hungry yet—”

Grr.

His flesh emitted a hungry growl, once again betraying his heart. And this is why I’m sick of physical bodies! He restrained his stomach with both arms, but it was to the point where he could do nothing against the involuntary movements of his own innards.

“Heh-heh, no need to fight it. You were incredibly busy in the Territories today; you must have used up the majority of your energy. Make sure to fully replenish yourself for tomorrow.” Smiling, Kuroyukihime stood up.

He wanted so much to say, Well, in that case, how about you at least stay for dinner? but the only thing he could make was frozen pizza or frozen doria or frozen chahan rice. Very few would say any of these was the sort of menu one invited guests to enjoy.

Even as Haruyuki agonized about it, Kuroyukihime was picking up her bag from the floor, cutting across the living room, and walking away.

That pace—

For an instant, he felt it was the slightest bit heavier than her usual spirited step. A sharp insight pierced Haruyuki.

Maybe the truth is she actually had something else she wanted to talk about? And there I was blabbing about all my own stuff, using up all our time? I was just in my own world, so happy, so fun, and I didn’t pick up on something important…?

Forgetting the intensity of his hunger, Haruyuki opened his mouth.

But no words came out. In this situation, it would seem almost like an afterthought; how could he ask her if she was worried about something or anything like that? He should’ve picked up on this an hour ago. Or at least half an hour ago. He would just have to shut his mouth now and wait for her to say something.

Staring at her back as she moved down the hallway toward the glass door, Haruyuki prayed, God, please give me just one chance here somehow.

It was at that moment a low noise, like the Earth rumbling, came from the distance.

Naturally, the source of the sound was not Haruyuki’s stomach. It was lightning. Tossing his gaze toward the living room window, he saw white flash twice, then three times, deep within the thick clouds that weakly reflected the lights of the city. The flare was followed by thunder, slightly louder and closer this time.

Immediately, droplets of water began to tap against the window, and as he watched the neon colors bleed, Haruyuki said hoarsely, “Um, Kuroyukihime. This rain’s pretty crazy.”

Kuroyukihime also stopped. “The weather report said there was a less than ten percent chance until midnight,” she replied, her face to him in profile. “It’s rare for them to be this far off the mark.”

“Uh, um. Do you have an umbrella?”

“Unfortunately, I am as you see. Sorry, but…” She spread empty hands, and Haruyuki wholeheartedly expected her to continue with something about waiting the rain out here. But… “…perhaps you could lend me one?”

“Uh…Yeah, right, of course.” Nodding firmly, he had no choice but to head toward the entryway when a second phenomenon stopped his feet.

A window popped up in the right side of his vision with a yellow warning mark.

“Oh…There’s a lightning strike advisory and a network damage report for Suginami and Setagaya.”

“So it seems. I can’t honestly believe that I would draw down a direct strike, but…I hate the idea of net lag on the way,” she said, furrowing her brow.

During the time you were coming and going, AR information—from local traffic bulletins, a navigation line to your destination, the distance you’d traveled to how many calories you’d burned—was quite handily displayed all over your visual field through the Neurolinker. But when the net wasn’t working properly and lags were frequent, it conversely made walking very difficult.

“Hmm. But the time is still the time, after all.” The normally immediately and incredibly decisive Kuroyukihime displayed a rare moment of indecision as she looked at the clock. Haruyuki followed her example and shifted his own gaze to the bottom right of his virtual desktop. 8:07 PM. The sort of time that couldn’t really be said to be early anymore but wasn’t particularly late, either.

The quiet sound of rain and thunder came to them from the other side of the window, and the two continued to stand awkwardly in the living room in unsettled postures.

Haruyuki breathed in and out several times before opening his mouth. But no matter how he tried, those final words would not come out. There was no real need for him to feel any kind of pressure, though. It would be better for her to wait until the rain stopped, or at least until the lightning storm had passed. It was a completely inoffensive thing to suggest, a thing that was, in fact, only natural. So then why was his heart rate soaring suddenly?

He couldn’t pick up the expression on her face, in profile two meters away from him. Hesitant, weary, somehow nervous, or maybe just waiting for something?

Pee-pong.

The default beep suddenly sounded, and Haruyuki froze with a gasp.

The window that appeared in the center of his vision this time was a text message through his home server. Sender: His mother. Subject: By tomorrow night. Main text: I won’t be home, so take care of things.

A third miracle. Although really, it was nothing so exaggerated as that. Practically every other weekend, Haruyuki’s mother came home on a different day from the one she had left on, and the rest of the weekends, she didn’t come home at all. However, for Haruyuki, this was the best and perhaps the ultimate timing. He closed the window and pushed a voice from his closed throat.

“Uh, uh, umm…It wouldn’t be any b-b-bother or anything at all. Th-that, umm, uh…” Haruyuki wrestled with whether or not to let her know the details of his mother’s mail and that there weren’t any kind of obstacles.

Kuroyukihime went ahead and got right to the heart of it. “No, your mother should be coming home pretty soon. It would no doubt be a bother. I’ll just…”

The instant he heard that, several of the safety valves in Haruyuki’s heart blew out, and the words flew out of his mouth on their own. “No, i-i-it’s fine! My mom said she isn’t c-c-c-coming home today!”

Crap! That’s way too blunt! I was just supposed to say I wanted her to wait out the rain. Haruyuki fell even further into panic. But…

Kuroyukihime merely twitched her upper body a nearly indiscernible amount. Finally, after rolling her eyes halfway around in the opposite direction from Haruyuki, still in profile, she said distinctly, “Is that so? Well then, I suppose I’ll impose on your kindness.”

“P-p-p-p-p-please d-d-d-d-do!” Bobbing his head up and down, in the back of his mind, Haruyuki was grateful for his mother’s principle of extreme laissez-faire. He could only pray now for the lightning above his head to tie things up for even a few seconds longer. If possible, an hour, no, at least thirty minutes…

Kuroyukihime started to walk again as her mouth moved at a fairly high speed. “Now that I’m thinking about it, we’re all meeting here at your house again tomorrow, and if I go home now, it’d just be twice the hassle.”

“Th-that’s true. It’s completely inefficient—”

—Huh?

It’s annoying to go home, since she’ll be here again tomorrow? What does that mean?

As Haruyuki stood frozen in place, stance unnatural and look baffled, before his eyes, Kuroyukihime placed her bag on a chair at the dining table and said: “So then, I’ll just duck into the mall downstairs.”

The words lingered in the air as she stepped out the door.

Supposedly, Haruyuki had made the expensive and fancy frozen margherita pizza he had secreted away in the depths of the freezer for supper, put more coffee on, and watched the evening news with Kuroyukihime on the sofa, but he had almost no memory of this time.

When he came to, he was alone in the living room.

However, the faint sound of a hair dryer coming from the bathroom down the hallway led him to believe that the whole thing had not, in fact, been a hallucination.

Here, finally, the transmission of his brain, which had been racing idly for more than two hours, managed to get into first gear, and Haruyuki recommenced his interrupted thoughts.

A hassle to go home. So then, was it okay to interpret those words to mean that she would not go home before the time of the race the next day? In which case, didn’t that inevitably lead to a situation in which Kuroyukihime remained in his house the whole night? In other words, wasn’t that “staying over”? Was such a situation legally and theoretically permitted to happen, despite the fact that they were in junior high? But there was no other way to interpret it.

Keep it together! Even if that’s what’s happening, you gotta deal with it calmly! I mean, it’s not the first time or anything. I mean, that time, too, she just sort of ended up staying. But that time Niko was here, too, and we had that big retro game playoff and then it just ended up us sleeping in the living room and all…

“Thanks for letting me use the bath.”

The door to the living room abruptly opened, and Haruyuki sprang to attention, looking over at the owner of the voice with such force that his vertebrae threatened to shoot out of his spine.

She was clad top and bottom in simple, warm gray pajamas that she had probably bought before at the shopping mall on the ground floor. “Somehow, I keep getting new pajamas,” Kuroyukihime said with a faint, wry smile, pulling her hair back with a hair tie.

“Ha—yeah…You can leave those here if you—” His mouth ran on automatic up to that point before he belatedly realized what he was saying. “I-I-I didn’t mean it like that! T-t-t-today’s just because of the lightning and it’s not like I’m totally thinking I want you to stay over again or anythi— I—I—I—I mean, it’s not like I would hate that at all or anything, so, uh, um, ummmm.”

Haruyuki gesticulated wildly with both head and hands while Kuroyukihime’s smile grew broader until she finally offered him a life raft.

“Maybe you should use the bath, too, before the water gets cold?”

“Right! I’ll do that!” He practically rolled off the sofa and escaped from the living room at top speed.

A bundle of confusion once more in the still-steamy bathroom, he hopped in and out of the bath, and while he changed into the sweats that served as his pajamas, Haruyuki gave his full attention to the actions he had to select from now.

And the answer he came up with as a result was slightly—no, fairly pathetic:

“Please use my mom’s bedroom! It’s the door at the end of the hallway! O-o-o-okay, then, good night!” he chattered/shouted from the entrance to the living room, locked himself up in his room, and yanked his duvet over his head.

He had vaguely guessed that Kuroyukihime had come over because she wanted to talk about something. But in circumstances like this, Haruyuki simply could not believe that he was able to stay calm face-to-face, what with her in her pajamas. He had no doubt that, just like before, once his brain overheated, he would end up spitting out all kinds of things that would be a hundred times better kept to himself. He wouldn’t even be surprised if he just collapsed from hyperventilation or dehydration or arrhythmia before he even got the chance to say something stupid.

And if that was where this was going, it was better to hide in his bed. At the very least, he’d be able to make it through the night without forever saving in his brain a memory that made him cry out “gaaah” or “ugh” every time he remembered it later.

But having activated full backward-looking-psychological-shut-in mode for the first time in a long time, Haruyuki gritted his teeth with self-loathing. The thought that he had grown stronger was nothing but wishful thinking, and he curled up into a tight ball.

Which is why, ten or so minutes later, when he heard a light knocking on the door and a voice asking, “Can we talk a minute?” he was deeply surprised that he didn’t pretend to be asleep.

Instead, he sat up in bed and took a deep breath. With the air pressure, he chased the worm of weakness from his body and replied in a clear, if hoarse, voice, “Sure.”

Once she soundlessly opened the door and came in, he saw that Kuroyukihime was inexplicably holding one of the large cushions from the sofa in both arms. She looked around the room before briskly stepping over to the edge of the bed and sitting down.

“I thought you’d tell me no,” she said in a small voice, her back toward him.

“…I thought I would, too,” he replied distinctly.

“So why’d you change your mind?”

“Hmm…uh…”

He was surprisingly calm. Despite being in this rather earth-shattering situation, Haruyuki felt composed and relaxed, perhaps because of his relief at having made it to this moment without committing any egregious errors.

“Because I was pretty sure you actually had something important you wanted to talk about.”

“What? You managed to see through me that far and yet you take the superspeedy sleep strategy?”

“I-I’m sorry.” He scratched his head as he apologized to the thin back, snapped straight before him.

“…Well, you did let me into your room now, so I’ll forgive you.” Kuroyukihime relaxed her shoulders, shifted slightly on the bed, and looked at Haruyuki sitting in the center of it. Her expression was kind, but, of course, the sorrow that had shaken her that whole day had still not disappeared from her eyes.

She lifted a slender finger and stroked the piano-black Neurolinker attached to her neck. At the same time, she murmured, “‘Those who lose all their points and have Brain Burst forcefully uninstalled lose all related memories.’”

Haruyuki gasped. This was the system to maintain the confidentiality of the Brain Burst program, the existence of which had been proven to them a mere two months earlier. It was absolute salvation for the defeated, and at the same time, an extremely merciless punishment.

Kuroyukihime brought her hand down as a faint smile with all kinds of emotion rose to her lips. “I was terrified when that final rule, a rule I had only heard rumors of before, was made so undeniably explicit. Because if I ever lose to another King just once, in that instant, I will forget who I have been. But, well, Haruyuki, at the same time, I…I was also relieved.”

Unable to instantly grasp her meaning, Haruyuki was confused. Kuroyukihime squeezed the cushion on her lap, hung her head low, and continued.

“Two and a half years ago, I forever banished one of the Kings from the Accelerated World with a surprise attack during a meeting. Ever since, I’ve been afraid in the depths of my heart. I thought he…the boy who was the first Red King, Red Rider, was out there somewhere in Tokyo nursing a deep grudge toward me.”

Haruyuki took a sharp breath.

She had told him this story countless times up to now. He had even seen a video file with a recording of that scene. So he had thought he understood the size of the scar this incident had left on her heart, but at the same time, he had foolishly thought that she had already overcome that pain.

“B-but…” Instinctively, he leaned toward Kuroyukihime, sitting on the right side of the bed, and started speaking in a daze. “Even if it was a surprise attack…wasn’t that still a just attack according to the rules? And he was the leader of an opposing Legion, plus back then, you didn’t have the non-ggression pact, right? So then there’s nothing to hold a grudge about—”

“That’s not it, Haruyuki.” Kuroyukihime interrupted his desperate words, shaking her head gently but firmly.

“Huh…What do you mean…?”

“I used my level-eight special attack Death By Embracing when I took off Red Rider’s head. The range is a mere seventy centimeters, but in exchange, it has a very high attack power. That said, it shouldn’t have been enough to kill Rider in a single blow. After all, he was the same level and a very pure fighting type, with a very high defensive capability, third after green and blue. Yes…you likely see it now. At that time, I activated the Incarnate System. That prohibited power that all seven Kings vowed not to use after the subjugation of the fourth Chrome Disaster.”

This time, Haruyuki was at a complete loss for words.

The image control system was a high-level interface hidden within Brain Burst. Deliberately using this system to go beyond the boundaries of the game was the so-called Incarnate System. Its power was tremendous, but at the same time, it held a terrifying dark side. Those who sought the power of the Incarnate had their hearts swallowed up by darkness; this was the consensus of the high-ranking Linkers Haruyuki knew. Kuroyukihime before him was no exception.

The slim back curled up even farther and from the depths, a dry voice resounded.

“Rider has the right to resent me and the way I broke that vow. I don’t regret choosing the path of fighting the other Kings, but the sensation of that single blow alone stains my arms…And that’s why, Haruyuki. For a long time, I firmly refused to believe the rumors that former Burst Linkers lost their memories of the Accelerated World. Because I couldn’t allow myself to cling to such rumors, to let them ease my burden. But, two months ago, when we finally got proof that the rumors of memory loss were true…I was relieved. It confirmed that Rider no longer remembered that he had been the Red King or that he had been chased out because of my betrayal. I truly did heave a sigh of relief from the bottom of my heart. Honestly…I’m such a hopeless coward…Ha-ha-ha…”

The figure of the pajama-clad Kuroyukihime laughing softly looked unusually weak and fragile. Haruyuki mustered up his minimal courage and shifted another five centimeters toward her.

But, of course, he couldn’t actually touch her hand or anything like that; instead, he simply spoke in all earnestness. “K-Kuroyukihime. I think that knowing that this sort of memory-loss treatment is lying in wait, and yet still going out there and fighting, puts an incredible amount of pressure on us. B-but we went and found out about it. We have to just accept that fact and keep fighting. In which case, getting a little relief from that in exchange, there’s nothing cowardly about that. Maybe the opposite. I think it’s only right.”

Kuroyukihime lifted her face a bit and glanced at Haruyuki. A pained, gentle smile bled onto her pale lips. “I see. That’s so like you, such a logical opinion. Right, you should be fighting with that kind of faith…However, I probably don’t have that right.”

“Wh-why not?!”

“Well, you see…Rider’s not the only Burst Linker who’s suffered an irreversible loss because of my Incarnate attack.”

“That’s…” Haruyuki blinked several times and furrowed his brow. “Do you mean the fourth Chrome Disaster? B-but you didn’t have any choice there.”

“No, that’s not it.” Kuroyukihime shook her head despondently, bound hair swinging. A few seconds later, she announced in a voice that was practically a sigh, “My…old friend. Before I made you my ‘child,’ she was the only person I was bound to by friendship in the real world as well…Fuko. Or rather, Sky Raker.”

“…Huh…?”

“The reason Chiyuri couldn’t recover Raker’s legs even with Citron Call after the Territories today was not because her will is at work. Mine is. Most likely, my will is even now eating into Raker’s scars and blocking any regrowth. Like a poison…Like a curse.”

“That’s—! That’s not true!!” Haruyuki cried out in a trance. He shook his head fiercely and leaned forward as he argued vehemently. “Raker herself says that she basically forced you into it. Right up to the end, you tried to change her mind, but Raker wouldn’t listen no matter what you said, so you had no choice: You cut her legs off…Isn’t that what happened?!”

“That’s exactly it, on the surface at least…” She buried her face in the cushion she was holding. “But…I was twelve at the time, even younger and more foolish than I am now. Rather than the path of fighting alongside me as Legion Submaster, she chose her longing for the sky…I couldn’t understand how she felt, how she was forced to that choice. In the end, once I grasped that Raker was never going to change her mind, my sadness…my anger…I put all these feelings into the blade of my right hand and amputated Raker’s legs. And in my heart at that time was most certainly the will that if that was how she wanted it, then she could lose her legs for the rest of time. That turned out to be a curse, one that lingers even now. It’s the same as the malice of the first Disaster that gave birth to the Armor of Catastrophe…”

She put all the strength in her arms into squeezing the cushion. Her cracking voice flowed quietly in the dim bedroom.

“Raker’s—and your—will is the materialization of hope. But mine’s not. Just the opposite. I overwrite with the power of rage, of resentment, of despair. Not building anything, not creating anything, just cutting things off, causing loss. As symbolized by the form of my ugly-in-the-extreme avatar…If you all keep fighting alongside me in the reborn Nega Nebulus—no, the Nega Nebulus that you all revived, I know you will…”

The latter half of her speech faded into obscurity, and Haruyuki felt almost as if he were listening to Kuroyukihime’s soundless self-recrimination.

No. No. You’re totally wrong.

There’s no way despair and loss are your essential nature. Because you saved me. You offered me a sincere hand and pulled me up from the bottom of the blackest bog. You offered me the most overwhelming salvation!

He shouted all this in his mind, but his ability to turn this vortex of emotion into words was decisively lacking. Haruyuki clenched his teeth and thought intently about how he could let her know just how she and Brain Burst itself had saved him.

The answer he came up with after about five seconds was:

“Kuroyukihime,” he said, pulled something out from a corner of the headboard, and gently offered it to her. It was an XSB cable covered in silver wire. With one plug in his left hand, he held the other in his outstretched right.

“Kuroyukihime, please duel with me. If you do, I’m sure you’ll understand…how…how much you…” Haruyuki was unable to hold back the emotions rising up in him, and tears spilled out of his eyes. Sniffling, he took a deep breath and continued in a shaky voice. “…how truly important you are to me.”

Kuroyukihime turned more than half her face to him now, eyes opened wide. A mixture of surprise, hesitation, and fear flitted across her face until it settled on a weak smile tinged with pain.

“You do always surprise me,” she murmured, accepting the plug. However, instead of plugging it into her own Neurolinker, Kuroyukihime crossed the bed to sit on her knees, directly in front of Haruyuki. The scent of soap and shampoo wafted up, sending his awareness flying off, despite the current situation. She placed her left hand on his head and gently pulled his head toward her.

“Now that I think about it, a one-on-one fight with you, this would be…” As she spoke, she fitted the plug into the terminal on his Neurolinker.

“…Th-the first time,” he replied as he stretched out the hand with the plug toward Kuroyukihime’s Neurolinker, trying to keep it from trembling too much. He faced her, met her eyes, and at the same time, jacked in. In his vision, the wired connection warning flashed.

The sensation that more than just the digital signals—that both of their consciousnesses were linked together—settled over him, and Haruyuki slowly called out the command.

“Burst Link.”

Thin legs covered in silver armor stepped down onto a cracked marble floor. The condo Haruyuki lived in had been transformed into a chalky temple. The walls dividing each house and each wall had all disappeared, and the entire floor had become a spacious atrium. The high ceiling was supported here and there by Greek-style pillars. A faint, pale yellow sun shone in through the external openings.

A Twilight stage, the very stage in which Haruyuki had received his first lecture from Kuroyukihime.

Finishing his check of his surroundings, he turned his gaze straight ahead to find a bewitching, elegant, obsidian avatar standing quietly some twenty meters away. Both hands, both feet, were long swords. An armor skirt resembling a flower petal encircled her slim waist, and both sides of her face mask glittered sharply.

Rather than in an attack posture, the traitor of the Accelerated World, the Black King Black Lotus, had both hands by her sides, her head hanging slightly. However, the slender standing figure was emitting an intense pressure, making him feel as though he were standing below an enormous guillotine, and Haruyuki involuntarily sent a shiver running through Silver Crow’s slim body.

No! This is not the time to lose your nerve! he shouted at himself beneath the silver mask.

The reason why Haruyuki had asked for a duel with Kuroyukihime was extremely simple. He just wanted to let her know the faith he had in her as the Burst Linker who supported him.

Brain Burst was, in essence, an online fighting game. And games were meant for having fun: the thrill, the excitement, the emotion of playing. And in the case of net games, the competition, the solidarity of fighting together. Players far and wide had the right to enjoy these. Games definitely did not exist to make people suffer.

The sole method Haruyuki had of communicating this belief to Kuroyukihime was to muster everything he had and fight here and now like this. He had to challenge her using all his power, convinced as she was that her avatar and her Incarnate reflected despair, that she dragged any opponent she crossed blades with into that despair. And he had to make her remember the fun of the duel.

And that’s why I—

“I’m not holding back, Kuroyukihime!!” Shouting, Haruyuki kicked at the ground ferociously.

Black Lotus did not move. However, without the slightest easing of the threatening presence emanating from her, she instantly raced a distance of twenty meters and pushed deep into the cracking marble.

His first blow was the thing he was best at: a right straight punch. He rotated his hips and shoulders forward as far as possible, but at the last possible second, Kuroyukihime lightly ducked the blow. It aimed for the center of her body, and she dodged it by bending in half.

Although she had accepted Haruyuki’s challenge, she was still held back by her own uncertainty. She wasn’t her usual top-notch self. She came back with a counterattack of a thrust with her right sword, but Haruyuki could clearly see the tip of it coming.

He lined up the fingers of his right hand, stretched out before him. Bending his arm like a whip, he went to meet Kuroyukihime’s thrust with a sword-hand.

Even though he hadn’t ever fought a direct duel with her, having fought alongside her in the Territories for the last six months, Haruyuki had noticed an extremely modest weak point in Kuroyukihime’s close-range fighting.

The swords of Black Lotus’s limbs were fearsome weapons for both offense and defense, but because they were, in the end, swords, there was a directionality to that power. Specifically, the attack power was concentrated exclusively in the edge, and the flat of the sword was even fragile, in fact. Of course, they weren’t likely to snap at a single blow, but he could pile on the damage there. And if he was looking for a chance of winning in a close-range fight, that was the only place he was going to find it.

“Hngah!”

With a cry, Haruyuki hit the side of the blade plunging toward him with a stiff chop of his right hand. Or at least tried to.

But the impact he anticipated didn’t happen. Instead: Soft…was the only way to describe the gentle response he felt, and Haruyuki was floored.

The long jet-black sword caught Haruyuki’s chopping hand with a small circular motion from the outside. It couldn’t be, but to Haruyuki’s eyes, it looked like the sword had transformed into some flexible material and was capturing his arm in a spiral. But this was only a fleeting sensation—

“Hah!” Here, Kuroyukihime allowed a brief exhalation and shook her right arm sharply as she took a step forward.

Instantly, an explosive backlash slammed into Haruyuki’s arm, up to his shoulder and chest.

“Wha—?!”

By the time he cried out, he was already being sent flying backward helplessly. Unable to get control over his posture, he crashed into a round pillar off in the distance. The pillar collapsed with a rumble, and still unable to stop, Haruyuki tumbled along on the floor before finally halting, arms and legs splayed.

He stared at the stars flickering before his eyes for more than a second before shaking his head and leaping to his feet. He managed somehow to keep himself from staggering, lifted his face, and shouted, “Wh-what was that just now?!”

Kuroyukihime leisurely hovered closer from afar and shrugged lightly. “The way of the firm against the way of the flexible,” she replied. “I suppose we could call it something like that. One of these days, I’ll tell you about when I trained in the Chinatown area of Yokohama. Anyway, Haruyuki, didn’t you have something you wanted to tell me?”

Her voice was calm, but Haruyuki was keenly aware of the single drop of desolation buried within it.

So Kuroyukihime was currently caught up in emotions she normally kept buried. Her duels generated only a negative energy. There was not a single thing she could give to her opponent, not the excitement of battle, not the solidarity of fighting together. Or so she was firmly convinced.

But you’re wrong! I am at maximum thrill right now! I’m not afraid. I’m shaking all over with real emotion, that someone as strong as you exists in this world…and that this person would fight with me.

Haruyuki kept himself from shouting out and clenched his hands into fists. He was sure this wasn’t something he could communicate with words. Which was why he wanted to fight. He couldn’t shrink now just because she sent him flying once. He couldn’t be done here unless he put forward everything he had in him.

“I’ll tell you with my fists!!” he yelled, and went into another dash.

The attack that had knocked him on his back had also eaten nearly 20 percent of his health gauge. But in exchange, his special-attack gauge had also been charged. As he ran, he gradually deployed the metallic fins on his back.

He abandoned his aim of trying to counter Black Lotus’s swords from the side and bet everything on a 3-D rush attack at zero distance, something he had been practicing in secret for a long time.

“Unh…aaah!”

Howling, he went for another long punch with his right hand. Kuroyukihime similarly came at him with a right thrust. With the difference in reach, he would get hit first if nothing changed.

The glittering sword tip drew nearer, closed in, and the instant it was about to touch his helmet, Haruyuki vibrated just his left wing hard, once. With no advance warning, Silver Crow’s body slid to the right, and the sword passed by, sparks scattering from the side of his helmet.

“…!”

The sound of Kuroyukihime inhaling sharply. But with no sign of stopping, she whirled her body around, using the sword tip of her left leg as a pivot, and tried to dodge Haruyuki’s punch. He shook his right wing. His trajectory was once again corrected to the inside and—

Clang! The modest and yet definite sound of impact was joined by sparks bouncing off Black Lotus’s left shoulder pauldron. And the health gauge in the upper right of his vision did indeed decrease, though by the smallest increment: a mere dot.

Now!

“Heeyaah!”

Haruyuki let loose a battle cry and waved his left leg high. Common sense would have it that a high kick would never hit its target in this kind of close-quarters situation. This was because such a kick required a certain amount of distance from the end of the left leg, which was the axis of revolution, and the end of the right leg, which was in the position to generate damage.

Perhaps surmising this, Kuroyukihime set herself up not to take the blow or to avoid it, but to counter with an elbow strike.

But here again, Haruyuki momentarily turned the thrust in his left wing all the way up. With his forward-leaning body as an axis, the high kick sang through the air with a minimal turning radius that would normally be impossible.

Kuroyukihime immediately canceled her elbow strike and threw her upper body back, but Silver Crow’s sharp toes scraped the left side of Black Lotus’s mask. Once again, sparks and minimal damage.

Normally, after pulling out a fancy move, Haruyuki inevitably stiffened up. But now, he used his left leg to kick off the ground while the force of his right leg swung around. Kuroyukihime, on the other hand, sank down in preparation to jump backward, perhaps disliking the close contact.

Another moment of thrust with his right wing. He jumped on the centripetal force generated and threw out a roundhouse kick from the left rear.

Kuroyukihime blocked with a bent left arm. Fierce impact. The orange flash effect colored the armor of both avatars and the surrounding marble.

Noticing the gauge in his upper right drop by two dots on the edge of his vision, Haruyuki this time put all the reactive force of the kick into the thrust of his left wing. His body spun suddenly in the opposite direction, and using this energy, he sent his left spear hand shooting out over and over. His fingertips dug shallowly into Kuroyukihime’s right shoulder.

When they were facing each other, he threw open both wings. A double-knee kick was just barely blocked by her right arm, and the biggest impact up to that point shook the stage. Damage: three dots.

This kind of uninterrupted rush, which took advantage of the instantaneous thrust of his wings, was the secondary use for his flying ability that Haruyuki had spent hours and hours training to use in his special bullet-dodging training room. Name: Aerial Combo. Compared with the primary use, Dive Attack, it seemed rather staid at first glance, and he couldn’t hope to do much damage with it, but in addition to the fact that he could use it indoors, he could also activate it with just 20 percent in his special-attack gauge. And, most importantly, it was nearly impossible to handle when you were seeing it for the first time!

“Aaaaah!”

Pushing his whole body into an acceleration that made his nerves shiver and sing, Haruyuki increased the speed of his rush even more. Maintaining close quarters, he continued to shoot out attacks, his limbs almost never touching the ground. Black Lotus managed to just barely dodge or block all of them, but even still, the damage he carved out steadily whittled down her gauge.

As he flitted about, totally absorbed in the battle, Haruyuki shouted in his mind, This is me now, Kuroyukihime. This is the full power of me, the person you pulled up from the swamps and gave wings. If your true nature is despair, if it’s loss that cuts everything away…then what is this fight now?!

At some point, the figure of Silver Crow had transformed into a congregation of silver light glittering in the air. He had thrown the door open for his reaction speed in a full-dive environment, a speed he had trained and built up in the virtual squash game in the Umesato local net, where he’d first caught the attention of Kuroyukihime way back when, and Haruyuki kept throwing out his midair combos. He wasn’t certain exactly how many dozens of times he had attacked, but he still had not landed a single clean blow. Kuroyukihime silently and thoroughly defended, single-mindedly evading or blocking Haruyuki’s rush, when his movements should have in theory been impossible to predict.

Although they exchanged no words, at a certain point, Haruyuki became aware of a deep, rich emotion being communicated between the two of them whenever their avatars touched.

Admiration. Haruyuki at Kuroyukihime’s defense techniques. And most likely, Kuroyukihime at Haruyuki’s midair rush. Both of their hearts were filled with an incredibly deep emotion.

Abruptly, he felt like he could hear her voice.

Ohh, I see…Was that it, then?

This is the duel. Forget everything and simply become one with your duel avatar; move as you wish. Even if it is a world that disappears in a mere 1.8 seconds, even if it is a contact that ends in 1.8 seconds…a mindful duel surely leaves something behind. It gives us something…

Rider and me. The countless battles Raker and I have fought since childhood, too, they must…Something precious has come from them…and even now, that something lingers in both of our hearts…

Haruyuki didn’t know whether he had actually heard these thoughts or not.

Because that voice came to him in the moment his right fist, thrust out for the hundredth time, touched Kuroyukihime’s left blade and was drawn into it, a moment almost outside of time.

In the next instant, that mysterious gravity once again violently swallowed up Haruyuki’s fist.

…Ah! The “way of the flexible”…!

Gritting his teeth, Haruyuki got ready to resist the explosive reactive force.

But it didn’t come. Instead, his body was pulled into her chest, both arms held firmly and brought to a stop.

“Huh…”

At this deeply unexpected development, Haruyuki stiffened up, unable to decide what he should do, and in his ear, her actual voice this time came whispering.

“That was wonderful, Haruyuki.”

Huh? The duel’s over? But both of our gauges are still pretty full. And we’ve got tons of time left…

In the moment that he glanced up at both of their health gauges, bewildered, Haruyuki understood something serious.

Because of the ceaseless, instantaneous thrusting with his wings, Silver Crow’s special-attack gauge had been used up from its full state, and only 10 percent remained.

In contrast, Black Lotus’s special-attack gauge was completely charged from the countless blocks, and glittered a full bright blue.

“It’s been two and a half years since I used this technique. Thank you, Silver Crow. Nice fight.” As she murmured, Black Lotus’s arms encircled Haruyuki under his own. Circled around his back, they flashed an intense violet.

“Death By Embracing.”

Following her utterance of the attack name, a light snip. Before the echoes of this had died away, Silver Crow’s health gauge turned entirely red, sliding into nothingness from the right end—to zero.

…Damn, that is some serious power.

This final, great admiration swelled up within him at about the same time the flaming text YOU LOSE popped up before his eyes. Fortunately, Haruyuki’s whole being emitted a silver light before the sensation of the top and bottom of his duel avatar separating came over him, and he exploded and scattered.

Passing through the darkness replete with the sensation of floating, he returned to the real world.

On his bed, Haruyuki opened his eyes and, after blinking several times, took a look at the face of Kuroyukihime, which should have been right there in front of him.

That was not to be, however. Because Kuroyukihime had in the blink of an eye pressed herself up against him, placed her head on his left shoulder, and wrapped both arms around him.

“Uh! Um! Hey—”

The black hair tickling his cheek and the scent of shampoo slammed into his brain, and Haruyuki tried to leap up while still sitting. But there was no way he could do something as agile as that, so instead, he abruptly lost his balance and fell backward. He hurriedly tried to recover himself with the thrust of his wings, but naturally, there was nothing of the sort on his flesh-and-blood back.

Thump! He fell onto the mattress, and, after a slight delay, the slender body of Kuroyukihime came in for a gentle landing on his stomach.

The faint rasp of the air conditioner in his ears, Haruyuki froze completely and utterly, both eyes wide open. Okay, just calm down! Make a calm decision before you do anything! Although that thought was in his head, he simply could not begin to grasp what was happening, much less act.

At eleven at night, he was lying on his bed in his usual sweats. He was fine up to that point. No problems there. But Kuroyukihime was in her pajamas on top of him, both hands wrapped around his back, squeezing even more tightly now—this situation, was it actually, really reality? And why was this even happening to start with? This whole thing had to be the doings of some kind of virus, start to finish?

“You surprised me.” Her real-world voice poured directly into his ears, and Haruyuki cut off his confused-to-the-extreme thoughts. “You…At some point along the way, you got that strong…”

Her murmuring voice was filled with emotion, and while Haruyuki was still unable to process a single thought, his mouth managed to move on its own.

“B-but the result was basically a perfect win for you…”

“That’s just a reflection of the difference in our levels. It was a much more equal fight than you think. When you kept on rushing me in midair like that, you really forced me to block, and desperately, for the first time in an incredibly long time.”

“R-really?” he said, half believing her, half not. In Haruyuki’s experience, the difference between his ability and that of the Black King was, to be honest, from the bottom of the space elevator up to the peak—no, out to geostationary orbit.

However, Kuroyukihime brought her head up a bit and stared into his eyes from extremely close up, smiling faintly. “Really. Aah, I wish I could let you know just how happy I am right now, how full of emotion I am!”

In the depths of her large black eyes, a light like stardust swirled, glittering. Just seeing that, his brain threatened to leap out of his head once again. Haruyuki didn’t know which of their hearts was creating the powerful heartbeat he felt on the border between their bodies, closer than they had ever been before.

They were so close, their noses were almost touching. They exchanged glances—

Kuroyukihime announced her next words calmly. “At the very least, I’ve decided to trust in the path I’ve walked this far. I’ll have many regrets, but…even so, the colossal amount of time I’ve spent in the Accelerated World and the countless duels I’ve played through were not in vain. Because as a result of this path, I found you and I was able to bring you in.” The five fingers of her right hand moved up from his back to caress his cheek.

“Haruyuki, I’m proud of you.”

The instant he heard this, all of the shock and confusion inside him evaporated and was replaced with something hot filling both eyes and flowing down the sides of his face and onto the sheets. The liquid kept coming, falling without stopping.

He blinked hard several times, and as he rubbed his face with the back of his right hand, Haruyuki began to excuse himself in a hoarse voice. “Oh…Um, I-I’m sorry. I…It’s…I—I—” But for some incredible reason, even his voice turned into heaving sobs, and in between words, he bawled like a child. Trying desperately to get this under some kind of control, he continued to speak. “I— That’s the first time in my life…a-anyone’s ever told me they’re p-proud of me. And—” Unwilling to expose his ugly sobbing face any more than that, Haruyuki tried to turn away.

But Kuroyukihime held him back with her whole body and stroked his head gently as she pressed her own face up against his slick cheek. “Well then, I will say fourteen years’ worth of it. You are the lone child of me—of the Black King, Black Lotus, and I am more proud of you than I am of anyone else in this world, my perfect partner.”

It felt like each time she patted his head softly, the thing blocking his chest eased pleasantly. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

The faintest of voices reached his ears. “No, you’re not just that. The real-world you, Haruyuki Arita, too…and me…Kuro…”

But he didn’t get to hear the rest.

Because here, Haruyuki had probably made the biggest of that night’s blunders.

Coupled with the exhaustion from mustering all his strength for the duel, the sweet pain of the overflowing emotions melting away, the sensation of her kind hand, and the warmth of their bodies touching, his consciousness had been smoothly sucked into the darkness.

In other words, he fell asleep. Like a log. In this especially, like a child.

He felt like the last thing he heard was mixed with a wry smile.

Good night, Haruyuki.