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Blackout.

Spotlight.

In the circle of white light: an enormous matte column, painted scarlet. Leaning back against its curved surface: a small doll, not a real person. The doll’s body is covered in metal armor of a silver hue, head encased in a helmet of the same.

A faint light grows to illuminate the surroundings. Nighttime. Countless bonfires flicker silently. The initial red column is not the only one; similar pillars stretch out in a seemingly endless row. The ground is blanketed by snow-white gravel. In the distant background, the silhouette of a massive palace looms. The silver helmet moves to gaze at the faraway castle.

…It’s not “absolutely impregnable.” Not even close.

He couldn’t help grumbling to himself, even though he was only too aware that this was totally a “reap what you sow” kind of situation.

He couldn’t voice this complaint out loud. Actually, he couldn’t even allow himself the soft crunch of a single footstep. The instant he made the slightest sound, the terrifying samurai-type Enemies parading around within the fortress might descend on him and attack all at once.

Each samurai was at most three meters tall. Enemies five times that size in the Beast class that lived in the world outside were not at all unusual. But the samurai, strutting through the long hallways and the tops of the castle walls in groups of three or four, armor clanging, emitted a concentrated pressure greater than Beasts, on par with Legends—or even the Four Gods standing guard at the gates of the palace.

Naturally, the fact that he had been able to get into the inner sanctuary of the palace—the solemn Castle reaching to the heavens in the center of the Unlimited Neutral Field—was precisely because he had breached the guard of those Four Gods. That said, however, this in no way meant he would be able to defeat even one of those samurai. Rather than breaching the guard of the Gods, it would be more accurate to say he had found a gap to sneak in through or, perhaps, made it inside through mere chance.

There has to at least be a leave portal in here, he told himself silently, to push back the fear and anxiety filling his heart.

Reflecting the light of the torches inside the Castle, his metal avatar was frozen right through, his heart echoing as it pounded beneath the somewhat dull silver of his armor. He was clearly in a desperate situation, the biggest crisis of his life as a BB player.

Still, he couldn’t deny that he felt just the tiniest bit excited.

It had already been eleven months since the birth of the Accelerated World—since Brain Burst, the full-dive fighting game application created by an unknown developer, had been distributed to approximately one hundred first-grade students living in the heart of Tokyo. Many players, after reaching level four during that time and thereby earning the right to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field, challenged the massive palace enthroned in the center of this world. Given that it was in a location that corresponded to the Imperial Palace in the real world, and the supreme gravitas of the structure (surrounded as it was by cliffs), it obviously had to be the final objective of the game—in the words of a child, the last boss’s castle.

But the challenges of every Burst Linker had been knocked aside with a single breath by the terrifying super Enemies, the Four Gods.

Genbu in the north. Seiryu in the east. Byakko in the west. And Suzaku in the south. While each was an independent Enemy with a five-level HP gauge, they also had the ability to support and heal one another. Specifically, the Gods not in combat sent buffers and heals to those fighting at the other gates with alarming force, which meant that players could not focus their fighting strength to crush each God individually. They also had to split their forces up and simultaneously attack all four. But that sort of large-scale strategy was not possible when the total number of Burst Linkers still had not reached five hundred, and these few players were divided into countless tiny Legions that were constantly wrangling with one another. In some cases, players who dared to challenge the Gods had taken a small-scale squad to charge one of the gates, only to die well onto the bridge, where they fell into Unlimited Enemy Death—although the term was not coined until later—and lost all their burst points.

Given all this, it only made sense that he’d be the tiniest bit thrilled at being inside the Castle, despite the fact that he hadn’t actually defeated the Four Gods.

If he could push on and reach the depths of the palace to get his hands on the final flag item there—whatever it was—perhaps his name would be forever etched into the narrative of the Accelerated World as the first person to clear Brain Burst.

He, a subdued metal color possessed of no significant abilities, was never paid any particular attention by anyone. His name—

Chrome Falcon.

Although his avatar name was kind of cool with the falcon bit, or maybe because of that, Chrome Falcon’s abilities and appearance had long been deemed to not live up to that name. And not just by his duel opponents; he thought so himself.

The only part of his avatar that resembled a bird of prey was the mask, which tapered to a sharp point at the bottom in the shape of a beak. His face was a smooth silver with no eye lenses, and he couldn’t shake the impression that this made him look like someone’s underling. His body was long and slender; his limbs had nothing in the way of weapons. Naturally, there was nothing that even hinted at wings on his back.

The only person who said his duel avatar—which had nothing but the attack abilities of Punch and Kick, the speed that came from being small, and the hardness of his body—was “amazing” was his tag-team partner, Saffron Blossom. He believed her sincerity in saying so, but at the very least, he wished he had something to complement her abilities.

Blossom had, as her name suggested, the power to make flowers bloom. She shot different kinds of seeds from a small stick in her right hand and embedded them in the Enemy—or an ally avatar. The flowers that bloomed after a certain period of time manifested a variety of effects, such as eating up health or special-attack gauges, stopping legs, or, conversely, applying buffer effects or removing debuffing effects. Critical gossips called this a “parasitic attack” and other unpleasant things, but even among other yellow colors, a duel avatar as all-purpose as she was was hard to find.

Of course, if a player had that much power, then naturally some other part of their skill set would have to be sacrificed, and in Blossom’s case, it was her fairly unreliable defensive power. To compensate for this weakness, she tag-teamed with the hard, metallic Falcon, and even after nearly six months of fighting together, that anxiety still lived in his heart. The anxiety about what would happen if someone even harder came along and invited Blossom to partner up.

The metallic color wheel, separate from the so-called normal color wheel, had the precious metals platinum and gold on the far left, and the base metals steel and iron on the right. Precious, base—regardless, the potential was the same if the level was, with placement on the left side being stronger against special attacks with poison, acid, or corrosion, and the farther right you went, the stronger the avatar was against physical attacks from punching or swords.

Chrome was basically in the center. Not having much resistance one way or the other, this metallic color existed in no small numbers, excelling only in the simple hardness of its armor. In fact, it wouldn’t be at all strange to come across a better shield among the normal colors, in the defensive-oriented green line.

In other words, given that all he had was the fact that he was a hard metal, he had no idea when Blossom would be taken from him.

He himself couldn’t quite grasp what this feeling was blocking his chest. While he had somehow managed to survive up to that point in a stronghold in the bay area of the Accelerated World, and other players had recently given him the nickname Black Eagle, when he burst out, he was still just an eight-year-old boy in second grade. Or maybe that was just an excuse, too: He had already spent nearly five years of subjective time in this world of no time limits since earning the right to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field.

So he did actually understand it somewhere in his mind. Understand why the other day, when he finally reached level five and obtained a certain special attack, he had immediately thought of the Castle…And why he had acted on that idea, why he was in this tight spot now, holding his breath, surrounded by countless terrifying Enemies. All of it was for his love of Saffron Blossom and his desire to monopolize her.

If he didn’t move soon, one of the samurai groups that moved around within the palace in a fixed pattern would show up in this hiding spot. He poked the edge of his mask out from the shadow of the crimson pillar and took a quick peek at the situation.

His current location was a corner of the main road that connected the Suzaku gate and the main entrance of the palace itself. It was in the southern area of the Castle’s inner garden, which in and of itself was a circle fifteen hundred meters in diameter. On both sides of the entrance, Enemies sat in wait, looking more like fierce gods than samurai with their extremely vicious countenances; there was no way he could break through them. He decided instead to set his sights on one of the windows in the white walls. Given that this was not an established route, there was a strong possibility that they couldn’t be opened from the outside, but if it would just please be a real window, he should be able to get inside.

He heard the footfalls of a group of samurai Enemies on patrol approaching from behind. Taking a deep breath, he put his right foot forward and very quietly said the name of his technique.

“Flash Blink.”

Perhaps picking up even this quiet utterance with their sharp ears, the samurai quickened into a run.

By then, however, the dark silver avatar had already completely disappeared from behind the pillar. Vanishing temporarily, leaving nothing but a blue afterimage, he materialized silently along the wall of the Castle, thirty meters away.

This was Chrome Falcon’s level-five special attack, a pseudoteleportation. Pseudo because it was an extension of the ability to move in a straight line at high speeds, so he could only move to somewhere he could see that was connected in space. But while moving, his avatar changed into a particle with zero mass, and physical and gravitational attacks were completely ineffective.

He reappeared with his back pressed up against the white wall and watched the samurai Enemies swarming the place he had been moments before. Having lost the intruder that was the target of their aggression, they swiveled their heads wildly in an attempt to regain their prey, but eventually, they returned to their original patrol route as if all was forgotten and began walking at a leisurely pace again. He heaved a sigh of relief. The attack AI of the samurai Enemies, at any rate, was clearly not on par with the Four Gods.

Glancing back, he looked up at the large window in the wall behind him.

He had been anticipating this, since the Field’s attribute was the Japanese Heian–style stage, but the window was indeed just red latticework incorporated into the wall lengthwise, with nothing resembling glass in it. Since one square was only about three centimeters on any given side, there wasn’t a duel avatar out there who could slip through this gap in their given form, but…

He glanced up and checked his special-attack gauge in the upper left of his field of view. Five percent remaining. There was also only 20 percent left in his health gauge, but either way, a single blow from the sword of a samurai Enemy would mean instant death, even if his gauge were full.

He carefully decided on a trajectory, planted his right foot forward, and used up the last of his gauge for a final Flash Blink.

The particulate body of Chrome Falcon slipped through the narrow gap in the frame and finally made it into the actual Imperial Palace.

It was this ability that had made it possible for him to fool the Four Gods and break through the absolutely impenetrable outer walls of the palace. The method he devised had been exceedingly simple: After charging up his special-attack gauge in advance, he headed first toward not the large bridges guarded by the Four Gods but the outer moat filled with infinite darkness surrounding the palace, where he Blinked the maximum distance. That said, even using up his entire gauge, the maximum he could travel was a hundred meters, not even close to being enough to cross the five-hundred-meter-wide palisade.

Because of this, he set his initial trajectory a bit higher up in the sky. The instant he reappeared above the palisade, the indisputable force of gravity caught hold of his avatar and tried to drag him to the bottom of the ravine, crunching away at his HP gauge. However, since this simultaneously recharged his special-attack gauge, he Blinked again diagonally into the sky once his gauge had reached a certain point. Then it was a matter of repeating this to cross the valley.

All that was well and good, but the truth was he had planned to simply experiment today in the name of reconnaissance. Once he confirmed that the cycle of Blink, charge, Blink was indeed possible, he had intended to fall to his death at the bottom of the ravine. He’d be regenerated in front of the palisade, and he could reexamine his plan based on the information he obtained. Once he was certain it was possible to actually implement, he would come back to take on the challenge of the real thing.

That was how it was supposed to go, at least, but here he was on his first try, on this reckless suicide mission, because falling into an infinite valley had been an unbelievably terrifying experience. He completely forgot himself on the first fall and continually and intently Blinked forward, so that before he knew it, he was clinging to the exterior wall in a trance.

The results were exactly what he’d been hoping for, but he didn’t get the chance to stand around and pat himself on the back.

While these eleven months since the beginning of the Accelerated World were a history of the fights among the children who became Brain Burst players, they were at the same time also a history of the conflict between all players and the mysterious game developer. The children turned all their youthful enthusiasm toward seeking out holes in the system—finding ways to earn delicious points—and the moment they found one, the developer plugged it up with an update patch. Any point-earning tech that had the faintest whiff of deceit such as Enemy Stalking or Tool Cheating (using external programs in the real world within the game) was dealt with so fast, it was surprising compared with other net games, and they could no longer use it. From the speed of this reaction, more than a few players insisted that it wasn’t a human who developed and ran BB, but rather an AI.

At any rate, the unknown developer appeared to be firm in their refusal to allow any back doors or shortcuts. And more than that, this developer sternly demanded payment equal to whatever the player was trying to gain in the Accelerated World.

Which meant that there was absolutely no way the developer was going to approve of Chrome Falcon flying over the moat to break into the impenetrable Castle, rather than going through the proper route through one of the four gates. A patch would be applied soon enough, and the super gravity of that palisade would be able to grab hold of even Flash Blink, a technique impervious to physical and gravitational effects. Maybe it was already being fixed at that very moment.

So this was his first and last chance.

I’m going to get something or do something here, and become a Burst Linker worthy of partnering with Saffron Blossom. So that I won’t have to live in fear of losing her anymore. So that I make her happy she chose me.

And, more than anything else, to pay her back for talking to me and reaching out to me, when I did nothing but look down at the ground in this world, just like in the real one.

Once he slipped in through the window frame, he was met with beautifully polished wooden floors and an inside wall made up of sliding fusuma doors, adorned with gorgeous color prints. Candlesticks stood at evenly spaced intervals, orange flames flickering quietly. No sign of any Enemies at the moment.

Checking the window behind him, he saw a small latch at the bottom. It wasn’t a meaningless decorative object; when he unlocked it and gently pushed on the window, the entire vermilion-painted frame lifted up soundlessly outward. At the very least, if he made it back here, he could get out of the Castle’s inner sanctuary.

But there would be no leave point portal there if he did. And he couldn’t exactly go home empty-handed after having come all this way. He’d made it to this point; he could only keep going deeper and deeper inside as far as his nerves and his luck would hold.

He held his breath beneath his silver mask and carefully began walking forward, as if his slender avatar were melting into the gloom.

How many hours—or days, for all he knew—had passed?

He had dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field right after he got home from elementary school, so logically, he had the leeway of staying in this world for a few days easily, or even a few months. In fact, he had once spent three months on a dive together with Blossom—or, rather, living together with her.

That said, continuing to advance while avoiding the range of detection of the Shinto priest and samurai Enemies several levels more terrifying than the ones in the garden was a more difficult task than he could have imagined. If Falcon hadn’t been a small, lightweight type, it likely would have been an impossible one. At the same time, the assumption of the architecture seemed to be that the palace would be captured by a large army of several dozens or even hundreds. The halls were excessively wide, the ceilings high. Because of this, somehow, he had been able to dodge the Enemy groups on patrol and make his way forward, but his powers of concentration were very nearly at their limit.

Big, deep breath. He used the air to cool his head and tried to pick out where he would go next from the shadow of a thick pillar.

The diameter of the entire Castle was fifteen hundred meters, and the distance from Suzakumon to the main gate guarded by the demon god was approximately four hundred meters. In which case, the size of the inner sanctuary should have been at most about seven hundred meters from north to south. He figured he had already advanced five hundred meters since he made it inside, so he should be getting to the center of the inner sanctuary soon.

Sure enough, at the end of a hallway stretching northward, he could see a remarkable large space and a mysterious light shining in the floor there.

Lined up, two of them. Transparent blue, flickering like the surface of water.

He had seen this color before. There was no mistaking it; this was the light of the leave points—also known as portals—set up in the landmarks of all areas of the Unlimited Neutral Field.

Unconsciously, he let out a sigh of relief before gulping hard. If he simply left now for the real world, not only would he not have the glory of clearing the game, he wouldn’t even be able to bring home a single piece of evidence that he had succeeded in breaking into the Castle. But then, why had he Blinked do-or-die toward the infinite palisade wall and endured the tension of this sneaking around for however many dozens of hours…?

No.

His original motivation for this personal mission hadn’t been as utilitarian as that. He had simply wanted something, one thing, that could be the core of his self-confidence. Something that would give him the power to keep standing proudly next to Saffron Blossom.

In which case, this was already enough. He had infiltrated the most dangerous area in the Accelerated World, had made it to the innermost sanctum, and would return alive. Even if he was the only one who knew all this, it should give him a certain strength for a long time to come. It was indeed a fact that he had achieved something that even the Pure Colors, currently deemed the strongest in the world, couldn’t do.

When he thought about it, there had been absolutely no explicit statement from the system side on what would happen when this magnificent, mysterious game known as Brain Burst was cleared. The name of the person who beat it might be announced to the entire Accelerated World, they might be given a certain amount of points in lieu of prize money and a certain sort of Enhanced Armament in lieu of a prize, and then the game could continue on. It would be nice if that happened, at least, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the ending theme suddenly playing as the credits scrolled by, and then THE END flashing in front of their eyes in all caps before the program was deleted from the Neurolinker of every BB player. And since he had naturally never met Blossom in the real and they hadn’t exchanged real contact information, if that happened, he’d never get to see her again.

Which was why he was sure that, if he did discover some clear-flag-ish item in this castle, he probably wouldn’t touch it. This was enough. Making it back alive through the portal was the greatest reward he could hope for with this mission.

Perhaps the actual god of the Accelerated World took pity on the sober metal color as he made this laudable speech to himself. Because, awaiting him in the open space he mustered up the last of his concentration to sneak into, lay no simple portal.

Two ellipses next to each other, filled with a quivering blue light, the very same light as found in the many leave points existing outside the Castle. But each had a strange object directly in front of it.

Stone pillars about a meter high, lustrous and black. No, perhaps better to call them pedestals. Atop each sat an object. On silent feet, he approached the one on the left.

Tilting his head back slightly, he saw enthroned there, bathed in the light of the portal, a single sword—though maybe it was a katana. The reason he couldn’t say for sure either way was that, although the workmanship on the guard and the grip looked Japanese, the scabbard was a perfectly straight line without a hint of a curve to it. The whole thing was a mirrorlike silver metal, with exceedingly little decoration.

Still, he could tell at a glance that this straight sword harbored terrifying power. If it was an Enhanced Armament, he had no doubt it was in the strongest class or maybe even beyond that. Just looking at it, he could feel a pressure that possibly rivaled that of a Legend-class Enemy at extremely close range—or even the Four Gods, which he had seen just once before, and they had almost taken his breath away.

With effort, he pulled his gaze away from the straight sword and looked again at the black, granite-like pedestal. A square metal plate was embedded on the front of it, with several shapes and characters carved into it.

The one at the very top was made up of seven connected dots, placed in a shape like a letter P that had fallen on its side to the left. He had seen this same shape when they studied the constellations in his elementary school science class: a square drawn by four stars and a tail of a line of three, the ladle-shaped Big Dipper. Staring at it closely, in the center of the dipper part, he saw that the fifth star from the left was the only one drawn larger than the others.

Under the constellation were two kanji characters, rare in the Accelerated World so full of English. They were jewel and point, and maybe read as gyokusho, but he didn’t know what they meant together like this. And then farther down was another line, this one in roman letters.

THE INFINITY.

He was pretty sure that meant boundless. It was probably the name of this straight sword Enhanced Armament in the system. Rolling the name around over and over beneath his silver mask, he slipped a few steps to the right and looked up at the other pedestal.

If he was forced to describe it, he’d say that sitting on this one was a Western design full-body defensive tool.

Armor.

It wasn’t anything oppressive. In a general VRMMORPG, it would likely be classed as light armor. The helmet was a crown type, and the chest, shoulder, and arm parts were also minimal. The lower body was nothing but knee-high boots. But there wasn’t a hint of cheapness to it. Like the sword, the entirety of the armor was mirrored silver, and concealed an incredible density of information that seemed like it would repel any and every attack. Even the air around it looked like it was warped somehow. Compared with this, even the armor of metallic Chrome Falcon was a toy.

Suppressing a sigh, he checked the plate on this one.

The overall design was the same as that of the sword pedestal. The upper part was a bas-relief of the Big Dipper. However, the larger star in this one was the sixth from the left. The kanji carved into it was again two characters, maybe read as kaiyou. And again, he didn’t understand their meaning.

And then the English name at the very bottom was—

THE DESTINY. He was pretty sure this meant…fate.

Once he had read that far, he took a step back and finally allowed himself to exhale heavily. Both were probably Enhanced Armaments in the top class in the Accelerated World. Sword and armor.

If he reached a hand out and touched them, they’d be his. He had heard rumors about finding Enhanced Armaments sitting on pedestals like this in the depths of dungeons, albeit in small numbers, all over the Unlimited Neutral Field.

But what bothered him were the portals shimmering immediately behind the pedestals. Obviously, these had to be related. In all probability, when he touched one item or the other, the portal would activate at the same time and forcefully return him to the real world.

In addition to the items being the activation key, these portals were likely one-time use only, and while one was activated, the neighboring pedestal was probably locked. In other words, an individual or a group could obtain either the sword or the armor, but not both at once. At any rate, he was faced with an either/or choice.

Just a few minutes earlier, he had thought just having made it in and gotten back out was plenty, but given this new development, he couldn’t come to such complete terms with the idea that he was unable to refrain from stretching his hand out toward the pedestals. His real-world age was eight, after all, and even adding in the time he had spent accelerated, he was still only thirteen.

From the placement, it was clear that he couldn’t use either portal unless he touched one of the armaments. But which one?

He had no doubt that he would become markedly stronger than he was at that moment, whether he equipped the sword or the armor. But it was meaningless if Chrome Falcon alone was enhanced. He needed to think about this with the assumption of tag-teaming with Saffron Blossom. The meaning of his existence was to protect her. So then the sword. Becoming any harder than he already was as a metal color, a defensive type to begin with, was gilding the lily. He turned toward the INFINITY pedestal, and legs that had begun to take a step toward it froze on the spot.

He had to protect Blossom. If that was his sole desire, then there was an even more optimal solution. A way to remove her weak point, her thin armor, and make it so that she could endure the fiercest of concentrated attacks.

Clenching his right hand into a fist, he banished the reluctance and desire that beat hard once in the center of his chest before stretching a hand out to the pure silver armor enshrined on the pedestal to the right.

Before he even had the chance to realize that his fingertips were touching it, a purple system message scrolled through the center of his vision along with a light sound effect.

YOU ACQUIRED AN ENHANCED ARMAMENT: THE DESTINY.

The armor transformed into particles of light and dissolved while the blue light of the portal spread out and engulfed Chrome Falcon.

Blackout.

Spotlight.

In the center of the circle of white light, a comfortable although not particularly large room pops up out of the gloom.

The walls and the floor are well-polished wood. In one corner, a black cooking stove. Hazy steam rises up from the pot on top. On the wall on the opposite side is a large bed. And on top of the snow-white sheets, two human shapes are seated side by side.

But they are not flesh-and-blood people. The body of one is enveloped in a dark silver armor. And the other’s entire form is a bright golden yellow, like the sun. The design of its short hair, shoulders, and hips is reminiscent of a flower that has just started to open.

Facing the silver figure hanging his head—a child being scolded—the golden yellow flower lightly raises an adorable fist.

“Honestly! Are you stupid?!”

She rapped his helmet sharply over and over. Pulling his neck in as far as it went, he made the same excuse he had already made repeatedly.

“Wh-which is why it was just supposed to be a test at first!”

“Then you should’ve come back the same way right away! Why would you just wander into the palace like that?!”

“B-because my HP was already pretty low…And I wasn’t sure if I’d actually regenerate on the outside again if I Blinked from the inside of the valley and died halfway, okay…?”

“Even if you did regenerate on the inside, your HP gauge would be totally recovered, so you could’ve just jumped back to the outside with Blink!”

“Unh…You’re totally right, but…”

He had absolutely no hope of winning over his more logical partner in this sort of back-and-forth. As he dropped his shoulders dejectedly, Chrome Falcon heard a heavy sigh, followed by a slender hand stroking the top of his helmet slowly, instead of another punch.

“Well, I have to give you credit for being adventurous enough to try and get into the Castle, and for having the nerves to go so deep and come back alive. You really did good, Fal.”

At this praise, he raised his head, feeling his chest tighten unconsciously. In front of him, a gentle smile spread across Saffron Blossom’s sweet face mask.

“Th-thanks, Fron,” he murmured, staring into her light blue eye lenses.

Blossom shrugged as if embarrassed, pulled her hand away from Chrome Falcon’s head, and stood up.

“I’ll put on some tea. Oh! And I’ll cut some cake to celebrate your safe return. I bought a really tasty one from the food shop in the Ginza Area back then.”

He watched his partner trot off to the other side of the room, where the kitchen was, and felt any number of emotions rise up in his chest once more, rendering him unable to speak.

After years—naturally, in Accelerated-World time—of hunting Enemies together, they had finally been able to buy the key to this small house in a corner of the Bay Area in the Unlimited Neutral Field, the reclaimed land called Odaiba in the real world. For Falcon, using those points to level up or buy an Enhanced Armament was indeed appealing, but seeing how moved Blossom was the first time he opened the door to their new residence instantly banished all such childish desires from his heart.

Since then, this room, with the household items they had brought in bit by bit over the course of nearly a year, was for Falcon now a more comfortable space than his own bedroom in the real world. Unlike the condo he lived in essentially alone, no brothers or sisters and parents working late every day, Blossom was always here in this room. Although sleeping in the bed together had unsurprisingly been fairly awkward for a while.

Why had she been so fixated on buying a house? She’d told him a month ago in real-world time.

Saffron Blossom had been born with an incurable disease that caused reduced performance of the mitochondria in her cells. Since it was genetic, the most cutting-edge micromachine treatment was ineffective. Although at present, her symptoms were on the level of tiring easily and getting headaches, she would eventually have attacks of seizure and paralysis, and at some point, lesions would spread to her heart. She had even been told by doctors that she most likely wouldn’t reach adulthood. The reason she had been continuously wearing a Neurolinker since she was a newborn, a device that had only just come onto the market then, was to keep constant watch over her symptoms.

In the same bed they were sitting on now, Blossom had grinned brightly at Falcon, unable to do anything but listen with wide-open eyes.

“Don’t make that face, Fal. Even if something does happen, we’re talking ten or fifteen years from now. And we have Brain Burst, don’t we? In this Accelerated World, I can live a proper full life, like everyone else. I’ll buy a cute and wonderful house and live there forever with the person I love, just the two of us…”

Blossom laughed, almost embarrassed, and when he accidentally asked, “Is that me?” she slapped at him.

He was happy. But at the same time, he felt a faint fear. Am I really enough?—that fear. Is Chrome Falcon really qualified to share the rest of Blossom’s life with her? That fear, too. The fact that he had taken on the extremely reckless challenge of infiltrating the Castle by himself was also because of that fear, which sat in the depths of his heart.

Which was why now that he had come back alive from the place, he couldn’t help but turn toward his partner in profile at the small table before him on which she had readied cake and tea and ask, “Hey, Fron? Why…Why me? I don’t have any real abilities. And I’m basically half-baked even for a metal color. Why’d you choose me?”

For a moment, Blossom looked puzzled before she abruptly pursed her lips tightly. “Aah, you forgot! Look, Fal, you’re the one who invited me to team up originally! You started talking to me in a superquiet voice in the Gallery, and I had to ask you to repeat yourself I don’t know how many times.”

“What…W-was that how it went?”

Flustered, he dug around in his memory, but that incident was already almost five years ago in experienced time. Even so, in the distant scene that drifted hazily back to life in the back of his head, it was indeed him speaking to Blossom first. You really had some nerve, huh? A virtual sweat broke out all over his avatar’s body as Blossom set down the teapot and walked over to him, slapping her hand down on his shoulder.

“So then I’ll ask you, Fal. Why’d you choose me? I didn’t have any techniques at all back then, and I was being hunted by the high-firepower types. So why?”

How can I tell you? That I knew you were the one the moment I saw you?

But he apparently couldn’t hide the strong emotions in his heart from his tag-team partner of so many years. Smiling gently, the sun-colored avatar wrapped slender arms around his helmet and hugged it to her chest.

“Me, too. I thought the same thing. There’s no other reason or anything, and I’ve never once regretted it…Now let’s have some tea. And then let’s go look at the ocean. It’s a Twilight stage outside right now, so I’m sure the sunset will be beautiful.”

Blackout.

Spotlight.

In the center of the white ring of light, two human figures appear, standing huddled close together. Chrome silver and saffron yellow.

The light that follows highlights a broad vista. The gentle ocean, the sun sinking into the horizon. The reflected light of the setting sun glittering between the waves strongly resembles the colors enveloping the two who stand watching it.

The night view of Tokyo Bay seen from Akatsuki Futo Park in the southwest corner of Odaiba was so beautiful, it almost made him wonder if it was really a 3-D graphic reconstructed from social camera images.

However, he could see none of the airplanes that would have been taking off and landing nonstop at Haneda Airport on the opposite shore if this had been the real world; in their place, a large pterosaur Enemy danced lazily in the orange sky. Blowing salt water up high into the air along the coast of the bay was not a whale, but rather a plesiosaur.

Every time he looked out on the vast Unlimited Neutral Field like this with Blossom, he simply couldn’t stop himself from thinking.

Just what exactly was this world created for? And what purpose is there in inviting only young children into it?

With his elementary school–student knowledge, he couldn’t even imagine the total amount of money that would have to be spent on building and managing such an enormous system. And up to that point, the so-called BB players had not paid a single yen in fees. There were all kinds of rumors that it was maybe market research for a major game company or a PR company’s new marketing method, but if that were the case, the program was distributed to far too few people to produce any real results.

About a year earlier, a hundred or so children had received client packages from an untraceable transmission source. Of these, a mere 30 percent had been able to make it to level two, where they could exercise the right to copy and install an unlimited number of times as a guardian—thirty people. From there, it had spread out again in the community of game-loving children as a medium, and although at present it had expanded to a total of five hundred people centered in the south of the twenty-three wards of Tokyo, this was still a scale so small as to make no sense for a business sales strategy.

Right from the start, the requirements to become a player of this Brain Burst game were too strict. There weren’t that many children who had been constantly wearing a Neurolinker since immediately after birth, allowing them long hours of full-dive experience. At any rate, the Brain Burst program was equipped with an installation compatibility checker module, so players could secretly check whether or not someone met the requirements in the background before sending them a file through a wired or ad hoc connection. Falcon hadn’t found a single person around him who qualified. And so, although he was already at level five, he had recently abandoned all efforts to become a “parent.”

Why? This parallel universe containing infinities in terms of space and time, what was it for…

“Are you thinking about it again, Fal?” Saffron Blossom murmured suddenly, coming to stand beside him. He blinked rapidly beneath his silver mask and cut off his rambling thoughts.

“Oh…yeah…I don’t really feel it in the general field, but looking out at the Unlimited Field like this, I can’t help but wonder. About where I—where we’re being taken.”

“…I know. I get that feeling…I think. Lately, when I talk to my friends or my family in the real world, sometimes, they give me these weird looks. I don’t mean for anything to change, but without even knowing it, I’m using these words and things I didn’t used to use…”

Blossom leaned into him helplessly, and he put a hand on her shoulder to pull her closer.

“There’s no way around it,” he continued. “I mean, we’ve spent—no, lived five years in this world already. We’ve seen a lot of things in that time, talked about a lot of stuff, had a lot of thoughts. If we’re just talking the age of our souls, then we’re way past sixth grade already. But…it’s not all bad, you know. The old me would have been too embarrassed to even be in the same place with a girl like you, much less talk to you.”

“Ha-ha! From where I’m standing, you’re still very much a kid, Mr. Peregrine.” Blossom smiled slightly, but her cherubic face mask was soon colored with sorrow again. “Hey, Fal? You hear about…about what happens to players who lose all their points and have the BB program uninstalled?”

He froze instantly at these murmured words, but then quickly released that tension and took pains to make sure his voice was level as he replied, “I’m sure it’s just a rumor. I mean, if you’re talking about that thing where players who lose the program also lose all their memories of the Accelerated World…I mean, it’s totally impossible. They can’t just manipulate a person’s memories like that.”

“But if we’re talking about that, the technology to accelerate your thoughts a thousand times, I mean, I couldn’t believe it at first. To be honest, I don’t fully understand the mechanism even now. Which is why I thought maybe deleting memories might be true, too…”

Given that his own grasp on the fundamental technology behind Brain Burst was also fairly tenuous, Falcon could only sit in silence.

Both of them were first-generation BB players, players with no “parents,” thought to number fewer than twenty already now, and neither had ever had a child of their own. So they hadn’t had any opportunity to actually verify the rumor that players who lost the program also lost their memories.

Even if they did have such an opportunity, however, getting proof was likely difficult. Because according to the rumor, those who left the Accelerated World lost interest in and detailed knowledge of Brain Burst rather than completely losing all related memories. A manipulation of the mind with a buffer, as it were, that didn’t create a blank spot in the player’s memory or make too much of a strange impression on the people around them. This might have been a more terrifying measure than a complete erasure of the memories.

One day, a comrade from the same Legion or a partner bound by the strong bond of parent and child suddenly forgets themselves—or rather, they don’t; they simply no longer show any interest in the whole thing. They treat all those other people as acquaintances they don’t care one way or the other about. If that was how it ended, maybe it would have been better to be made into a complete stranger. At least then, there would still be the slim chance that you could meet and become friends once more…

These chilly thoughts suddenly shook his avatar. And then a whispered voice reached his ears:

“Fal. The thing is, I—in a little while, I think I might make a child.”

“What…”

He stared down at his partner’s face, her words completely unexpected. Blossom smiled for a moment as if embarrassed, but regained her composure soon enough and started speaking quietly.

“I never had the confidence that I could take care of a child, so I never managed to take the plunge, but lately, my win ratio in the general duels has stabilized, and I’ve collected a fair bit of know-how about fighting Enemies, right? So that means that even if my child’s in danger points-wise, I should be able to support them to a certain extent. Still, that doesn’t mean I’d spoil them and transfer them for free, y’know? Maybe like they could pay me back when they hit level four and can go hunting Enemies?”

“Uh…Uh-huh, right…”

He nodded as he thought about how Blossom would for sure be a strict, but kind and solid mom—or rather, “parent.”

Turning her gaze away from Falcon and out toward the commanding view of the Pacific Ocean beyond Tokyo Bay, Saffron Blossom said something even more surprising. “And, like, this is way, way in the future, but I’m thinking of starting a Legion one day.”

“Huh? You’re gonna do the Territories?” he asked, flustered, and her short, golden yellow hair swung wildly from side to side.

“No, no. This area around Odaiba’s been a blank zone all this time, so maybe I’ll just make a territory announcement, but that’s not my goal. I don’t want to make a fighting Legion…I dunno, more like a cooperative Legion.”

“Cooperative? Like everyone helping each other?”

“Yeah, like that. I said before that if my child was in trouble, I’d give them points and then they’d pay me back one day, right? I was kind of thinking I could maybe turn that into a larger-scale system.”

His partner’s words had at last gone beyond the realm of his comprehension, and he cocked his head deeply to one side. Blossom whirled around to face him and took both of his hands.

“Look, Fal,” she said, the look on her face even more serious. “We’ve been a tag team since we were level one, right? Both of us lost ourselves in the fight, and we rose up to levels two, three, four. And before you know it, we’re level five. But now I think we were incredibly lucky. I mean…it’s not something I especially like to think about, but the flip side of us leveling up is who knows how many BB players losing all their points and leaving the Accelerated World…”

“……”

It was just like she said. He personally had only seen that instant when someone’s points dropped to zero a few times, but it was a definite fact that a mere eleven months after the game started, four out of five of the first generation had already disappeared.

When he was unable to even nod at the weight of her words, the small hands gripping his wrists moved gently, as if to comfort him. At the same time came a soft murmur.

“Sorry, Fal. It’s not like I especially regret anything. Brain Burst’s a fighting game; someone has to win, someone has to lose. I’m not trying to deny that basic principle. But…But, you know, the idea of my points dropping to zero, of losing this program, my memories, everything, of never being able to come to this world again…It’s just too harsh. I’ve seen so many people with only a few points left, and they didn’t look like they were having fun at all. And if it’s not fun anymore, it’s not a game…”

Maybe that harshness is exactly what the mysterious game developer wanted. The thought flitted through his mind, but he didn’t say it out loud. Instead, he asked gently, “So…you want to make a cooperative Legion?”

“…Yeah. We’ll save up a lot of points and then lend them to people about to lose theirs. Once they’re stabilized, they can participate in Enemy hunts to pay them back. These five years, I’ve learned all the tricks of hunting, so much so that I hate it. As long as we have this know-how, we should be able to seriously reduce the risk of accidents in Enemy fights.”

“But…but, like.” Trying desperately to understand this plan of hers, he very timidly asked, “If all the players joined this cooperative system, then there wouldn’t be anyone losing all their points anymore, so the points players spend on acceleration and leveling up would just come from Enemy hunting? Is something like that possible?”

“It can be done. I’m sure we can do it…No, we have to do it,” she said, a serious light he had never seen before shining in her pale blue eye lenses, so reminiscent of the spring sky. “I—The other day, I heard a terrible rumor. Some Legions are looking for kids with acceleration compatibility at arcades and amusement parks, and once they find one, they forward them the BB program.”

“I-it’s a bit crude, for sure, but wouldn’t that work as a way to increase the number of players?”

“You don’t get it. They’re not taking those kids they make their children under their wings or anything. They don’t tell them what Brain Burst is, they just fight duel after duel directing or on a local net, and steal every one of their child’s initial hundred points. And then the child’s forced into an uninstall…”

“Wh…” He swallowed hard. This wasn’t canvassing. This was just hunting, wasn’t it? Not Enemies, but players.

“If it’s true,” Blossom said tensely, staring at the speechless Falcon from extremely close up, “then it’s just wrong. Even if the system lets it happen, it’s absolutely wrong. I don’t have any real power yet, but…But I have to do something. Bit by bit even, I have to do what I can. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I’ll make a child, try out a point loan structure, start up a Legion…so that someday, everyone in this world can laugh and have fun with this game.”

Before he knew it, he was holding Blossom tightly. “I’ll help,” he murmured earnestly to the slender avatar in his arms. “Although I’m the one with no power, just a tiny metal color…For you, for this world, I’ll do everything I can. Brain Burst is a fighting game, and games should be fun. I-I’ve had fun fighting alongside you up to now, Fron. Ever since I met you, I’ve looked forward to tomorrow coming. I want to share that with other players.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me, too,” Blossom replied in a shaky voice. “I’ve had fun with you, Fal. And we’re going to keep having fun for a long time, I know it. Let’s make it more fun together. I know the two of us can do it.”

He hugged her tightly once more and then gently pushed her shoulders back. He held up a finger to indicate she should wait a second, before touching his own health gauge in the top left of his field of view and opening a menu window. He ran his finger through his storage and turned a single item into an object.

A card that glittered silver like a mirror. Most items you could get in the Unlimited Neutral Field were in the shape of cards like this at first. Enhanced Armament was no exception; when you got some in dungeons or from Enemy drops, it was transferred to your storage sealed in a card. Ownership was set the first time someone equipped it.

He took the card from the window and held it out to Blossom.

Small letters were carved onto the surface—THE DESTINY. The silver armor he had obtained in the depths of the Castle, likely the world’s best.

“Fron, I want you to have this. I’m sure it’ll make your dreams come true.”

Blossom raised timid hands and placed them gently on the card.

At that moment, they had no way of knowing yet that this incredible power would distort both of their destinies…

Blackout.

Spotlight.

In the circle of white light, a single slender figure appears.

Coloring its entire body is a saffron yellow reminiscent of sunlight in spring. However, a shade that did not previously adorn it can be spied here and there. A mirrorlike silver glitters on the forehead and chest, legs and arms.

The short hair, in the shape of a bud beginning to flower, hangs forward, toward the ground. Both arms are spread out to her sides, and the slim legs stretch out loosely, helplessly. She is able to remain unwaveringly upright in such an unstable position because something restrains her from behind.

Thin, something clipped from a large board, matte black—a cross. Perhaps it emits some kind of magnetic force; the saffron-colored figure is stuck fast.

The illumination spreads gradually to finally light up her surroundings.

The ground, lustrous, greenish, metallic. Bizarre, similarly metallic insects rustle as they squirm along. The cross stands at the bottom of a large basin, an indent like a mortar without its pestle. Very close by, enormous pits open gaping black mouths, the sides wet with clear mucous.

The spotlight widens even farther outward.

At the edge of the basin, about thirty meters in diameter, several dozen human figures form a circle. Not moving nor speaking, they keep silent and stare at the cross at the bottom of the depression. Almost as if they know something is about to happen. They hold their breath, open their eyes wide, and fear this something—or eagerly await it.

From among these silhouettes, a single one falls to the ground.

A small body with a silver luster tinged black. Slim limbs, round helmet. Perhaps trying desperately to stand again, the sharp, tapered fingers dig deep into the metallic earth. However, the figure cannot move. He is restrained on both sides, pinched between two thin, matte-black panels, resembling the cross at the bottom of the basin.

The metallic insects crawling around sluggishly abruptly begin running in all directions. They crawl into the creases like the gills of a living creature that cover the ground and disappear instantly.

Zrr zrr zrr. Zrr zrr zrr. The low, weighty sound of vibration echoes from the enormous pit at the center of the depression.

“Stop…Stop! Stoooooooop!!”

He didn’t know anymore if he had screamed the word dozens of times or hundreds, only to have it swallowed up in vain each time by the sky in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

Countless thin scratches were carved out of the ground in front of him, where he clawed at it with his fingers. But no matter how much force he put into it, he could move only from the elbow. Although the jet-black panels squeezing his arms from the shoulders didn’t have any thickness to speak of, they clamped tightly against the avatar of Chrome Falcon with an absolute pressure, like an enormous vise.

More incredibly, the player controlling these two panels had made the inky black cross appear, far away at the bottom of the depression, to restrain Saffron Blossom at the same time.

Blossom hung limply, no longer having the strength to move. And with good reason: The intensity of the agony she had tasted in this past hour or so far surpassed even the sum total of all the pain ever experienced in the Accelerated World up to that point.

And the fierce rage and despair that raced through Falcon’s mind was also something he had never before in his life experienced.

“Stop…Stop, please stop…” He pushed a cracking voice out from between clenched teeth. At the same time, he dug out new parallel lines in the hard ground of the Purgatory stage with his avatar’s fingers. But he couldn’t move. This sense of helplessness further deepened his despair.

He felt the eerie vibration in his body. It was coming again.

That something was crawling out from a hole, more than two meters in diameter, at the center of the basin next to the cross holding Blossom up. A dozen tapered tentacles appeared first, waving back and forth. These were followed by two rows of red lights shining in the depths of the darkness. These lights—eyes—instantly made onlookers feel the creature’s insatiable hunger. The countless eyes glittered fiercely the instant they detected Blossom, only steps away.

An utterly enormous worm-type monster then leapt out of the pit with a wet sound, scattering droplets of mucous. The hell snake Jormungand, a Legend-class Enemy, the strongest beings in the Accelerated World outside of the Four Gods that guarded the four gates of the Castle.

This type of Enemy appeared only in stages that were in part organic, such as Purgatory, Plague, or Corroded Forest, and if a player happened to stumble across one, their fate was essentially sealed. However, since its Territory as a Legend was only a small crater, thirty meters in diameter, even if you were killed by it once, it was possible to get away in the ten or so seconds before Jormungand appeared again after you were regenerated. As long as something—or someone—wasn’t deliberately blocking your movement.

Jormungand approached the head of Saffron Blossom hung up on the black cross, completely unable to move. Beneath lens-like red eyes, neatly arranged in two rows for a total of sixteen, there was a circular mouth—a predation hole—surrounded by long tentacles. It was filled out by layers of sawlike teeth, and a viscous fluid dripped unceasingly from the bottomless hole as it shot out toward the slender avatar. Saffron’s body shuddered momentarily; her head sagged even farther.

“Stop…Stooooooop!!” But there was no reason the inhuman Enemy would even hear the hoarse, unconscious cry from under Falcon’s helmet.

The snake’s meter-wide mouth stretched open above Blossom’s head. The mucous it secreted continued to ooze out without pause, and white smoke puffed up from the golden yellow armor it fell upon. The fluid had the effect of temporarily and significantly reducing an avatar’s physical defense power. The silver armor Blossom was clad in suddenly lost its sheen. As if waiting for this, Jormungand swallowed her torso wholesale with the cross.

Before his eyes, his view dyed a light red with the scorching heat of his emotions, the partner he had lived a lifetime with shrieked in endless agony.

The power of the Enhanced Armament Destiny far exceeded his expectations.

It rendered physical attacks essentially ineffective—slicing, hitting, piercing, shooting, exploding, all of it. When it came to energy attacks as well, it reflected laser types. Resistant against cold, heat, electricity. Only corrosion, the natural Enemy of metal armor, could not be repelled, but there were basically no duel avatars with that kind of attack anyway. Invincible, without exaggeration; its defensive power was almost frightening.

However, when he thought about it, in theory, only someone who had broken through the absolutely invulnerable superclass Enemies, the Four Gods, could obtain this armor, so it was probably the final item in this game Brain Burst. Aided by chance and luck, and some system flaws, he had managed to acquire it now, when the game was likely still in the opening stages. So it wasn’t strange at all that it would exhibit such overwhelming power.

Even its owner herself, Saffron Blossom, was afraid of the power of the Destiny, so great that it could destroy the balance of the game itself. At any rate, the full-charge special attacks of red and blue types, which had up to that point taken essentially all of her health gauge in one blow, now carved away only the merest hint of damage, even with a direct hit. After she had appeared in just a few general duels, talk had raced around the Accelerated World, and Blossom had gotten a flood of offers to buy the armor and invitations to join powerful Legions. And of course, much cursing about how it was a fraud, she was a cheat, et cetera et cetera.

If this had been back when she had just been fighting tag-team duel after duel with Falcon, Blossom would probably have sealed the armor away or disposed of it.

But she now had an impossible dream. She wanted to start up a cooperative Legion to prevent total point loss, remove the brutal death game elements from the Accelerated World, so that everyone could have fun fighting—or, better yet, she wanted to make a place where they could live.

Given that Saffron had been sentenced to die before reaching adulthood and had accepted that destiny within herself, perhaps this was her own secret struggle. She wanted to scatter seeds over the desolate land of the Accelerated World and make flowers bloom. Maybe this had been her dream all this time, since the moment she’d become a BB player.

To actually make the burst point–lending system that was the heart of the cooperative Legion work, she first needed a sufficient points pool. And the fighting power to keep in check those participants of malicious intent planning to skip out on the bill who were sure to appear.

For Blossom, the Destiny and its overwhelming power, plenty even for Enemy hunting, never mind duels, was nothing other than a ticket to the realization of this dream. Although wearing the armor did cut back on the number of challenges from outside, Blossom and Falcon repulsed without exception the many warriors who did come at them.

On the day that they had managed to crush even one of the Pure Colors, said to be the strongest in that world—albeit two against one—Blossom finally announced her own plan to the broader Accelerated World. At the same time, she started widely recruiting people wishing to join the new Legion.

And then yesterday. More than thirty BB players had jointly signed and sent a message saying that they wanted to hear more of the details.

The pair was delighted, but they felt a hint of unease. Because those players had requested the Unlimited Neutral Field as a place to meet and talk. They wanted to confirm that it was really possible to safely hunt Enemies, and Blossom and Falcon basically agreed with their reasoning, but they couldn’t know what would happen in that field. In the worst-case scenario, all thirty of the signatories would attack at once.

But even assuming they did, equipped with the Destiny, it was unthinkable that Blossom would be killed with one blow. So they gave themselves some insurance by specifying a meeting place near a leave point. If it was a trap, they could immediately leap into the portal.

Still, they couldn’t say this plan was foolproof. Direct attacks weren’t the only abilities duel avatars had. If anyone gathered at the meeting had some kind of obstruction attack like Blossom herself did, such as freezing legs or stealing vision, there was a possibility that they would be prevented from escaping through the portal. However, they dared to overlook this risk. Among the names in the message were more than a few old acquaintances. They couldn’t really believe that all these people were conspiring together to set a malicious trap. They didn’t want to believe it.

Just in case, they checked the place for the day’s meeting—a portal in a building corresponding to the Shibaura parking area on the north side of the Rainbow Bridge in the real world—from afar first. Among the more than thirty avatars already gathered were indeed the faces noted in the message.

As Blossom and Falcon stepped out from under the elevated Shuto expressway and started walking, heaving sighs of relief, two thin black panels suddenly appeared from beneath their feet.

An incredible pressure held them categorically in place.

“Stop…Please stop! Why…Why would you…!!”

The screams poured out of him unawares as Chrome Falcon stared at the terrifying snake, worlds removed from the fabled image of the romantic concept of a legend, burying its countless fangs in his beloved partner.

The question was addressed to the dozens of BB players standing along the edge of the depression that was the snake’s nest.

The majority were faces he knew, and there were several he was friendly enough with to make amiable conversation with if they happened to be in the Gallery together. Naturally, he had dueled them any number of times, but his wins and losses were about fifty–fifty. He couldn’t remember doing anything that would cause anyone to hate him so much as to set up a trap this cruel.

But they maintained their silence, not even glancing in the direction of Falcon pinned to the ground. Their attention was focused completely on the tragedy unfolding at the bottom of the basin. A similar awe and shuddering fear colored all their face masks. But that wasn’t the whole of it. Falcon felt strongly that the terror on their faces masked something very, very unpleasant underneath.

Suddenly, he heard a low, smooth voice from behind him to the right. “Sorry, Falcon. I at least will respond on their behalf.”

The owner of the voice that so vividly reminded him of some schoolteacher somewhere was the very person controlling the two thin panels and the cross, restraining Falcon and Blossom. Falcon didn’t know his name. He had never seen him before in the Accelerated World, not even once, this duel avatar and its bizarre form—pieces of a black sheet cut out and stood up in the shape of a person.

“The power of that Enhanced Armament is too far beyond the norms of this world, given that it is still in its dawn. You no doubt experienced this fact directly yourself via the duels you’ve fought these last few days?”

Even the oldest BB players could only be in second grade in the real world. Having worn a Neurolinker continuously from immediately after birth was a requirement for the installation of Brain Burst, and consumer Neurolinkers had gone on sale the year that Falcon and the others in the “first generation” had been born.

However, the tone of the jet-black layered avatar could hardly be thought to be that of a child. It sounded even older than the young man in his twenties who was Falcon’s homeroom teacher in the real world. Fighting back against the pressure of the thin panels, Falcon focused on pushing his voice out.

“Then…we’ll dispose of the armor in the shop. All the points we get for it, we distribute equally to everyone. That’s gotta be good…There’s no need to do all this. There isn’t, right…!!”

“Unfortunately, with that method, the Enhanced Armament will remain in the shop. We very well might see someone come forward to obtain it and once again destroy the balance of the game. That armor must be returned to where it was originally. The only method of achieving that end, Falcon, is for a power other than that of a player to eliminate the owner.”

At the same time as the infinitely calm voice related all this to him, Saffron Blossom’s avatar crumbled into countless tiny pieces in Jormungand’s mouth and was smashed to bits. A pillar of golden yellow light rose up high into the sky, drawing out a momentary grave marker before disappearing.

The hell snake, having butchered the intruder in a single bite, slithered back into its nest, waving its tentacles in a seemingly satisfied manner. The jet-black cross also sank soundlessly into a thin shadow on the ground.

And then all that was left was a small saffron yellow light. According to the rules of the Unlimited Neutral Field, Blossom would regenerate in that location after being placed in a ghost state for an hour. She should have, at least.

But to his left, from a place Falcon couldn’t see, his view blocked by a black panel, a stealthy voice whispered, “Resurrect By Compassion.”

Riding on a voice so pure and clean it almost couldn’t belong to a human being, tiny particles of light flowed out into space and danced down to the bottom of the basin. The instant they touched the golden yellow “embers,” a pillar of dazzling white light poured down from the sky, contracted and condensed to take shape as a lone avatar: Saffron Blossom. The cross appeared at the feet of the slender silhouette as she very nearly crumpled to the ground, to hold her in place once more and stand her up right next to the snake’s nest.

They had already been through the same process countless times. The number of burst points a player lost in death in an Enemy fight was fixed at ten, so the points she had built up through successive wins this last little while weren’t so easily exhausted. A never-ending cycle of cruel death and even crueler rebirth.

There were other instances before this of an avatar plunging deep into the territory of a Legend and being killed over and over, unable to escape, until they lost all their points. BB players fearfully called this phenomenon Unlimited Enemy Death. However, the layered black avatar and the others who had set this trap for Falcon and Blossom were deliberately bringing this phenomenon about with the black cross and the white light. As a result, it wasn’t death, but rather a passive execution. Unlimited Enemy Kill.

…Please, just stop already. Having lost the power to even raise his voice in supplication, he simply prayed beneath his silver surface.

In the Unlimited Neutral Field, the sensation of pain from damage was increased, so that it was essentially the same as in the real world. Each time Blossom was killed by Jormungand, she would have experienced intense pain equivalent to her body actually being ripped apart. Even if there wasn’t a scratch on her real body, the memory of the pain carved into her consciousness—her soul—would never disappear.

No…

Perhaps the source of the pain she actually felt was not the monster’s fangs, but rather the stares of the dozens of players standing around the basin. These people who were once friends, who’d called Blossom out with a fake message, dropped her into this trap, and simply watched as she was killed over and over again by a horrific snake.

More than just terror and panic, Fal could definitely catch hints of a vague excitement in their face masks. Part of it was that childish element of I saw something scary. But an ugly emotion much more real hid behind that, the exact same thing that bled through when a group in elementary school tried to expel someone different from them.

And simultaneously, in the exact same position as the student who simply watches from a safe distance, unable to do anything for the person being expunged, was Chrome Falcon.

If only he hadn’t snuck into the Castle; if only he hadn’t brought out the Enhanced Armament Destiny. If he hadn’t given it to Blossom, none of this would be happening. He had caused all of this, and yet he was simply staring at the suffering figure of the person he loved, not a scratch on him.

The snake, detecting the forcefully resurrected Blossom, came slithering out from the depths of its nest once again to approach her. The shuffling vibration shook the ground, but the golden yellow avatar no longer even flinched. She hung lifelessly from the black cross, waiting for death for the nth time. Or else the total loss of points, the loss of memory that came after these deaths, under the name “the end.”

I…

I’m making the same mistake again.

I won’t pretend not to see anymore. I’m never going to avert my eyes again from someone hurt and alienated and about to lose their place. I promised myself that. And yet I can’t do anything. I’m just losing someone important like this again…

“…No.” His mental energy almost entirely exhausted, he squeezed a voice out. “No more. I’m sick of being the one left behind.”

The two thin plates that held his avatar communicated to his senses an absolute weight, as if the world itself were fixing them there. Falcon had already been made quite aware of the fact that, no matter how much strength he mustered up, he could not move them even a millimeter. But there was still just one possibility for escape.

Break his own metallic armor instead of the jet-black panels.

“Unh…Ah…Aaaaaah…” Focusing on his creaking groan, he mustered up the last of his strength and pushed at the panels on either side with both arms. Pushed.

The chrome silver armor shrieked, unable to withstand the pressure. Up to that point, this was where he had given up. But now he ignored the feeling that he would be crushed and pushed harder.

“Now stop that, Falcon,” the layered avatar murmured, sounding genuinely concerned. “We have no intention of eliminating you. Once our plan is complete, we intend to properly release you. It’ll likely only be one or two more times, so perhaps you could please sit quietly until then.”

“Shut…up…!!” He turned his revolt at the selfish remarks into physical power and hit at the black panels. Thin cracks finally began to race along the armor of both arms. A pain resembling sparks. But this was not enough. It was most certainly not enough.

“…Ngh…!!”

With a soundless howl he released as much force as he could, and in an instant the armor of both arms crumbled away with a hard metallic sound. A damage effect resembling fresh blood gushed out from his dark-gray basic-construct body, and a pain so intense it stopped his breath raced along his nerves. And then, along with a serious drop in his HP gauge, his special-attack gauge was charged about 20 percent. He shouted hoarsely, “Flash Blink!”

The avatar of Chrome Falcon transformed into substanceless quanta and finally escaped the restraint of the thin panels. At a speed that was basically teleporting, he charged forward and materialized fifteen meters away.

Before his eyes was the crucified Saffron Blossom and the head of Jormungand ready to bite into that slim body.

With the last ounce of his strength, he beat at the enormous snake with the sharp toes of his right foot, smashing one of its many red eyes. The injured eye oozed a viscous fluid, and the two-tiered HP gauge of his Enemy dropped a depressingly minuscule amount. But, perhaps caught off guard and surprised, the snake released Blossom and shook its head wildly.

As they were bathed in the enraged thundering roar of the Enemy, a faint voice weakly disturbed the air.

“Petal Shelter.”

Several massive green petals were generated from the base of the cross to create a round bud that enclosed them both—Saffron Blossom’s level-five special attack. The tough flower petals protected the interior completely against any and all attacks. Effect time: thirty seconds.

Inside the sphere full of a peaceful light-green glow, Falcon caught Blossom as she fell from the now-vanished cross with his armorless arms.

He crouched down with her and stared intently at the face of his beloved partner. These thirty seconds were the final moments given to them.

Once the petals disappeared, the cross would reappear to restrain them both. And then there was no doubt that Jormungand would follow its instincts and continue to butcher its prey, now increased in number.

Naturally, he had no regrets at having leapt into the place of his own death. But Falcon couldn’t find the words he should say in this precious time. So he clenched his teeth, suppressed a howl, and kept staring intently at Blossom’s face mask. So that he would absolutely never forget the sky color of her eyes even after he disappeared from the Accelerated World.

“…I’m sorry.” The words spilled out, her voice hoarse. “I’m sorry, Fal. I…I was spoiled by your kindness. I wanted to get back the future that was stolen from me in the real world…And because of that, I pushed you to pretend to be an adult, too. This end…my own impatience made this happen. I’m sorry…”

Particles of clear light fell from Blossom’s eye lenses one after the other and melted into the air.

You didn’t. Not at all.

He wanted to tell her this, but a hot lump blocked his throat, and he couldn’t speak. He at least shook his head hard. She caressed his helmet with her slender index finger.

“But, y’know…Believe this at least. I loved you. I’ve loved you since the moment we first met. I mean, I knew it right away. That you wanted to protect weak me. While everyone else was thinking about how to steal someone else’s points, you…you alone…”

Without giving voice to the rest of that sentence, Blossom smiled. And then she moved her hand from his cheek to clasp his hand and guide it. To the center of her own chest, gruesomely torn up by Jormungand’s teeth.

“A last request. Fal, make me disappear.”

“…What…” He finally managed to utter just that, and Blossom smiled.

“I only have seven points left,” she announced. “If I’m going to be killed by that Enemy and disappear from this world, then I want you to be the one to send me off. That way, Brain Burst might force an uninstall, but I’m sure I’ll still be able to remember you. Even if all my memories are erased, at least you, forever.”

Here, the effect time of the technique finally ended, and the green flower bud slowly began to melt away from the top. The howl of rage of the snake shattered the silence that had filled the sphere.

“…Fron.” The time they had left was much too short for him to put into words all the thoughts that filled him. Pulling the destroyed, sunlight-colored avatar tightly to him with his left arm, Falcon whispered, with all the emotion in his heart, “Thanks.”

Thanks. Thanks for taking the hand I offered. Thanks for teaching me so many things. Thanks for expanding my tiny world.

He stretched out the fingers of the hand she held. His sharply tapered fingertips, patterned after a bird of prey, touched down in the center of Saffron Blossom’s chest, immediately above the critical point of her heart.

“…I love you.”

As Falcon made this declaration, words he had never once been able to get out before, he thrust his sharp right hand downward.

His flat hand pierced deeper and deeper into the Destiny armor, rendered ineffective by Jormungand’s fangs and digestive fluids.

Good-bye, Fal. I love you, you know.

Her voice became the faintest hint of a gentle breeze, flowing through his consciousness and disappearing.

Rather than breaking into a thousand fragments and scattering explosively, Saffron Blossom’s avatar gently unraveled. Bathed in light the color of the warm spring sun, the slender silhouette split into countless ribbons and danced up into the sky. Those ribbons were reduced to even smaller threads of code, and then melted into the air before finally vanishing.

The final extinction phenomenon. The complete retreat from the Accelerated World of those who lost all their points.

When he came back to himself, his heart was empty.

Almost as if he himself had vanished, a sense of loss overcame the crouching Chrome Falcon as the countless fangs of Jormungand bit into his back with a screech.

In the Enemy’s mouth, he was raised up high. Orange sparks scattered from his silver armor. Kree, kreee. His avatar’s entire body squealed and groaned, and the health gauge in his field of view dropped before his eyes. At the same time, he was assaulted with a dizzying pain.

But he did not scream. Blossom had experienced this pain a practically infinite number of times. He gritted his teeth; he desperately endured it. In the distance in his hazy, warped vision, he could see the figures of the players standing in a circle.

In their eyes was a uniform surprise—and a hint of contempt. They were laughing scornfully at a fool who would senselessly throw his own life away.

It wasn’t actually impossible for him to escape from this situation. All he had to do was use his special-attack gauge and do his Blink once again.

But he wasn’t going to run anymore. Was there even any meaning in living?

Saffron Blossom was gone. He was alone again. Even if he did escape and live on, what would be the point in going back to his solo player life and fighting purposeless duels? If that was how it was going to be, he was better off devoured here by the snake like Blossom. Over and over and over again. Have his points run out like she did and be expelled from this world. Until that moment—

Abruptly, he noticed a small light flashing beneath the HP gauge being carved away and the special-attack gauge being filled up. The light followed precisely when he turned his head. It was a system message. The square cursor was trying to tell him something.

The instant he focused his hazy vision on that point, a row of text flowed soundlessly out from it.

YOU ACQUIRED AN ENHANCED ARMAMENT: THE DESTINY.

For a minute, he couldn’t understand what this meant.

The message was telling him he had acquired an Enhanced Armament. And it didn’t say GOT like it did for Enhanced Armament obtained in sealed card form, but ACQUIRED to indicate that he had become the owner of it. The subject was armor. The Disaster, which should have disappeared together with Saffron Blossom.

But why? The only methods of transferring an Enhanced Armament were to sell and rebuy it in the shop or hand it over in a direct duel.

Or wait. He’d heard vague rumors of one other way. When the player who owned the Enhanced Armament was eliminated from the Accelerated World, in a very small percentage of cases, the Enhanced Armament was transferred to the storage of the player who delivered the final blow.

He had no way of knowing now if Blossom had asked him to strike the final blow for her because she had been hoping for this result.

However, to Falcon, it felt like a final message from her.

Live. Live and fight.

Unconsciously, he murmured under his silver surface the default voice command to equip an Enhanced Armament.

“Equip…the Destiny.”

An intense light like a small star was born, and the world was dyed platinum.

Thick silver armor covered his limbs and torso with a sharp metallic sound. The design was very different from when Blossom had been wearing the armor. By nature, Enhanced Armament would automatically adjust in size according to the stature of the duel avatar putting it on, but the way this armor changed went far beyond the realm of adjustment. It lost its former elegance and delicacy and took on the appearance of plate armor, all sharp edges.

The last piece, covering his head, was an samurai-style helmet rather than the original crown. Enclosing more than 80 percent of Falcon’s body, the thick armor repelled with a fierce clang Jormungand’s fangs as they were about to dig into his avatar.

The enormous Legend-ranked Enemy let out a cry of fury as it tried to devour Falcon once more, while at the same time, excreting a large quantity of transparent, viscous fluid from the glands between its fangs. This dripped down onto the silver armor and tried to steal its strength with a corrosion effect.

But the gleaming, mirrored silver clouded over for an instant before changing to a blackish chrome silver, as if a thin film had been peeled off and then resisted the corrosion. The new color matched that of Falcon’s original armor perfectly.

Chrome fell basically in the middle of the metal color chart, between precious and base metals. It had only mediocre resistance to physical and special attacks. Its lone special characteristic was that it essentially completely repelled corrosion-type attacks.

The armor, a supposedly volitionless Enhanced Armament, was resisting the monster’s mucous by absorbing the characteristics of the avatar wearing it—that was the only explanation for this phenomenon. Although Falcon couldn’t have cared less about suppositions of this sort on the logical side of things.

As if guided by something, he raised both hands and seized the enormous fangs trying to pierce his chest, sending sparks flying everywhere.

Fwoosh! In the depths of his heart, something began to burn.

It was a feeling he had never had in the eleven months since landing in the Accelerated World, a subjective time of more than five years. Molded by and born from his deep affection for Saffron Blossom and his despair at her death: rage.

“Unh…Unnaaaah…” A husky groan spilled out from deep in his throat.

In the real world, too, Chrome Falcon was a child who did not get angry. He did what grown-ups told him to, he was careful to watch the faces of those around him, he lived with his own self on the back burner.

So when the class started bullying his best friend from kindergarten the instant they started at the same elementary school, he did nothing; he simply distanced himself from the other boy. He shut his eyes, plugged his ears, and waited for someone else to do something. But before that someone could appear, the boy who had been his good friend was gone.

He really should have gotten angry at least. At the children who instigated the bullying. At the teacher who was oblivious to it. At himself pretending not to have seen anything. But, unable to do even that, he pushed and shoved until all his memories and feelings were the size of a pebble and then buried that in a deep place.

“Unh…ah…aaaaaah…” Falcon’s cry continued, his voice warped. He felt like now the pebble had fine cracks in it, and something incandescent was gushing out.

All ten of his fingers transformed into massive talons with a chang. The sharp tips creaked as they dug into Jormungand’s fangs. The edges of the armor from his arms to his shoulders became even more tapered and increased in volume.

Now he understood why the thirty people who had sent the fake Legion entry message had betrayed him and Blossom and set this trap. Wasn’t it because they wanted to get this Enhanced Armament, maybe thinking they could cheat with it?

Saffron Blossom’s not like us. She had the strength to protect her ideals and make them a reality.

“But…you…”

All of you, you’re BB players; you had to have been treated more or less like aliens in the real world. You had to have been shunned by some group and come to this Accelerated World with that hurt carved into your soul. And yet you still shun someone else? You make a circle around someone different from you and throw rocks at them?

“For people like you…Fron was…trying to make…a place to belong…” As he squeezed this rage out from his depths, his avatar’s hands took on a weak light. Not energy to illuminate anything. A negative fluctuation to steal heat, light.

An aura of darkness.

This kind of continuous effect was supposed to cloak a duel avatar only when it was using its gauge and activating its special attack. And yet Falcon’s special-attack gauge stayed at essentially full charge; it didn’t drop a single pixel.

But he continued to spit out his strangled speech, unaware of this abnormality.

“Fron was…just trying…to make this world a place…where you could always…play, where you didn’t have to…be scared of losing all your points…that’s all…”

Before he even knew it, Falcon had buried his ten talons deep into Jormungand’s fangs and pulled them completely free of his body. The monster blinked two rows of eyes and twisted itself up and writhed violently, but the avatar’s arms didn’t budge beneath their aura of darkness.

“That’s all…she wanted!!”

A roar like vomiting blood.

Deep in his mind, Falcon heard the sound of the pebble of frozen feelings being smashed to bits.

Rage. Any- and everything he had suppressed all this time—from before he could remember until this very moment today—exploded and ran wild within his avatar before becoming a shadowy aura and being released to the outside world.

Pulsations of darkness shook and cracked the snake’s thick skin, as though they were an actual physical phenomenon, splitting the top edge of the Enemy’s round mouth as it screeched.

“Ah…aaah…aaaaaaaaaaah!!” The yell was distorted, metallic, as Falcon thrust the arms clutching the fangs out to both sides.

Jormungand’s head was ripped in half with a curious sound. The majority of its eyes ruptured from the inside, and massive quantities of fluid jetted out of the deep fissure. Ignoring this, he plunged his hands into the crack, grabbed on to the soft matter inside, and pulled the monster even farther apart. Split it.

When his feet hit the ground, the hell snake was in two parts down to its midsection. As the right half writhed and tried to disappear into its nest, he caught it in the talons of both hands and similarly held the left side fast with the pointed ends of his feet. Mustering up every ounce of power in his body, he ripped the beast in half in one pull, right down to its tail.

The body of the Enemy, finally completely divided, stopped in an unnatural shape for a moment before turning into thousands of fragments and scattering.

From the center of an explosion effect so grand it blanketed the entire basin, something long and slender materialized and stood before Falcon. A long sword with a cool, clear crystal-white blade. An Enemy drop Enhanced Armament. Without hesitating, he reached out and grabbed onto the hilt, which glittered like it held a star within it.

Instantly, the longsword became a small card and disappeared. In the top of his field of view was a small system message: YOU ACQUIRED AN ENHANCED ARMAMENT: STAR CASTER.

“Equip Star Caster,” he muttered in a creaking voice.

The divine design of the longsword reappeared in his right hand. However, the dark aura immediately blanketed the sword, distorting the color and the shape. The transparent crystal became a dazzling chrome silver. The straight lines of the hilt twisted ominously. The blade itself doubled in width and thickness, fangs popping up in several places.

He gripped the large sword in its new form with both hands and held it in front of his body. The blackish-silver blade reflected a single duel avatar. It was no longer the simple, slender Chrome Falcon and his round helmet. The silhouette was the epitome of brutal, the will to destroy itself made into an object.

Only his original smooth mask was exposed beneath the open helm. But the aura of darkness cohered on the forehead of the helmet, creating a visor large enough to cover his entire face. Once he lowered it, he would never be able to go back to what he had been. He knew this instinctively.

If I changed, Fron’d definitely be sad.

But she’s not in this world anymore.

Taking this as his last moment, he abandoned the name Chrome Falcon. He buried it in this ground with Saffron Blossom. Her ideals, her kindness, her compassion, he would bury it all here.

Because the ones who had rejected those ideals were the players standing stock-still around the basin. Rather than harmony, they chose war. Instead of joining hands, they preferred to steal life from one another. More than love, they desired anger and hatred. In which case…

He would give it to them.

Brandishing the sword high with both hands, indignation and rage still jetting up from the depths of his body, he howled once more.

“Ngah…Aaaaaah…!!”

The aura of darkness gushing from all parts of his body gave rise to jet-black lightning, striking the metallic earth one bolt after another. Cracks raced out in circles from beneath his feet; the ground rippled and shook. He screamed again, almost in resonance with the cries of the earth.

“Rrraa…aaaaaaah!!”

He felt the bottomless rage welling up inside him become a kind of medium and interfere with the system itself. As proof that this was no mere hallucination, even the font in the system colors still displayed in the top of his vision flickered repeatedly. The two lines of text, THE DESTINY and STAR CASTER, twisted, crumbled, and melted into each other. They became one line to form a new word.

THE DISASTER.

“Grrr…raaaaaaah!!”

The scream was already not that of a person. It was the howl of a starved, enraged beast.

Kasshk. The visor on his forehead came down by itself with a violent sound.

A light-gray filter covered his field of view. However, the resolution doubled, and he could clearly make out the expressions on the faces of the duel avatars in a circle around him. They were blurred with confusion and surprise and unease. But what they were feeling, what they were thinking, no longer held any meaning for Falcon. They were nothing more than targets for the slaughter. He narrowed his eyes beneath his visor and sought out the body he should hunt first.

When he turned his attention to any particular spot in the circle, the murmured conversation of the several avatars standing there was amplified and delivered to his sense of hearing as if a high-powered directional microphone had been turned on them.

“…ge full recovery confirmed. No depletion of special-attack gauge. No doubt about it, it’s Main Visualizer overwrite through Imagination circuit.”

The voice belonged to a tiny avatar with four excessively large, shining eye lenses. Responding to it was the layered black avatar that had restrained Falcon and Blossom with its strange technique.

“It seems that an explosion of sentiment through deepening of concentration can indeed bring about the phenomenon overwhelmingly fast. Although whether it can be controlled or not is a different issue.”

The four-eyed avatar nodded. “True, true. And it’s basically for sure that peeps with a mental-scar shell strength that goes beyond a certain level turn into metal colors. But whether that fusion’s a power inherent to the Seven Stars or just ’cause he’s a metal color, I can’t tell with my Analyze.”

“Hmm. If possible, I’d want you to take your time and do a thorough analysis, but—”

At that moment, there came a different voice from behind them. “Can you secure him, Vise?”

Brimming with a clear sweetness almost like the water of a snowmelt, with no hint of bitterness, without a doubt, this was the voice of the player who had continuously forced Blossom to resurrect. Fal sharpened his eyes even further beneath his visor, but a mysterious light blocked his view, and he couldn’t see the avatar on the other side.

“I suppose I’ll give it a go.” The layered avatar nodded a head that was nothing more than an arrangement of thin panels and raised a left hand of the same design.

The several panels comprising that arm slid off and disappeared into the ground one after another. Immediately after this, the black cross appeared soundlessly behind Falcon and pulled at his body with its bizarre magnetism.

But.

“Gr…aaaah!”

With a short roar, he sliced the sword in his right hand to the rear, and the cross was quickly destroyed, producing a sound and feel like glass shattering. The bright light of a damage effect gushed out from the left shoulder of the wielder of the panels.

“Whoops. Quite incredible. I very much cannot hold him with a normal technique.”

Falcon focused more intently on the layered avatar muttering this. There were too many words in this conversation that were impossible to understand, but one thing at least was clear, and that was that they had planned the whole thing. That, in line with some kind of scheme or another, they had called Saffron Blossom out and tortured her to death with Unlimited Enemy Kill.

In which case, they should be the first ones he hunted.

Gripping the big sword with both hands, he brandished it high above his head in a solemn motion. He completely ignored the dozen or so confused and panicking players on the outer edge of the crater, turned toward the jet-black layered avatar, and took a single step. He soundlessly uttered the name of his technique.

Flash Blink!

He brought down his blade at the same time as he teleported at super-high speed and severed the layered avatar’s remaining arm at the base. However, his opponent, who lacked a face-like face, showed not the slightest air of being disturbed; he took a single step back and disassembled the body that had suddenly lost both arms.

These pieces transformed into two enormous panels, which then closed around the four-eyed avatar standing next to him and also the avatar enveloped in light from behind. By some logic, the massive panels closed into one single, thin panel.

Falcon sliced horizontally with his sword at the enormous ink-black panel sinking into the shadows on the ground. But the swing managed only to slice off a diagonal piece of the top edge and send it flying. The panel produced a gentle ripple in the shadow and sank into it completely; the aura of the three mysterious players vanished from the field.

“Gr…raaah…”

A groan of rage slipped out at having his Enemies steal away on him. A few seconds later, skrrinnk! An ear-splitting metallic sound accompanied a light blow to his left shoulder.

He turned around languidly. Standing there was a midsize blue duel avatar. In both hands, it held a large, close-range weapon that was like a cross between a wooden sword and a traditional longsword. His opponent was someone whose face he knew well, who he could have been said to be close with. One of the few first generation, a direct attack from that long spear had even shattered the armor of the former Chrome Falcon. But a glance at his right shoulder showed that there wasn’t a crack or even the tiniest dent now.

His opponent looked as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and without even trying to remember his name, Falcon casually brought down the sword enveloped in the dark aura.

Whud. The heavy noise shook the cool air. The weapon the blue avatar held fell apart in the middle, and then the top half of its owner’s body also slid off and tumbled onto the ground. The lower half was a little late to tilt backward, only to stop halfway into its fall and explode, scattering at the same time as the upper half. Now all that remained was a small light the color of its armor.

A violent and distinct shiver ran through the thirty or so people still left at the sight of a high-tier player being slaughtered with a single blow. Trembling voices—What’s happening, this isn’t what I signed up for—gradually increased in volume.

“Crap…R-run!!”

The instant someone shouted this, they all began to race in a single direction, like a dam had broken. They were no doubt intending to flee to the real world through the leave point in the Shibaura parking area some dozen or so meters ahead. However…

Flash Blink.

As he sent up this silent prayer, his blackish silver armor disappeared and reappeared immediately in front of the fleeing players. Another slicing attack. Three heads fell simultaneously.

“Unh…ungah…ungaaaaaah!”

Shrieks. Screams. Some players still tried to run, others tried to hide in the surrounding buildings, and still others tried counterattacks, but the sword of darkness swept down on all of them without exception and stole their gauges from them in one blow.

Propelling Falcon forward now was no longer simple rage. A sublime determination that went beyond resentment or revenge—a curse.

That this world would be destroyed.

If a Burst Linker from later years saw Chrome Falcon at this time through some hidden logic of Brain Burst, they would have made this judgment: that this dark overlay was a manifestation of a purely negative will. That this was the dark side of the Incarnate System itself, smashing everything in existence through an absolute desire for negation.

When the slaughter—barely seconds long—was over, only the countless embers flickered silently around the basin. The blackish-silver destroyer plunged the great sword into the earth, now that it had absorbed plenty of blood, and grew still.

To wait for them to regenerate in an hour.

That day, more than thirty players were exterminated from the Accelerated World all at once.

The lone survivor who had the good luck to make it to the portal alive gave an account to freeze the blood in anyone’s veins, shaking with terror all the while. The story—that Chrome Falcon clad in an evil armor had slaughtered all of her companions—was initially met with raised eyebrows.

But those who challenged Falcon to a general duel in an attempt to confirm her story were, without exception, decimated in a single blow from that great sword, and everyone was forced to accept that it was true. That a terrifying catastrophe had been born into the Accelerated World that had grown up over this last year or so.

At some point, the players stopped called this destroyer by the original avatar name. Crowning him with the name of the Enhanced Armament, they called him thus:

Chrome Disaster.

Blackout.

Spotlight.

In the circle of white light, a knight appears, body wrapped in dark metallic armor, holding a sinister sword. The crouching figure is tattered and wounded, cracked; the sword is also severely chipped and scratched.

To back him up against this wall, the strongest players in the Accelerated World challenged him to endless battles and exhausted him, sometimes in the one-against-many Battle Royale mode.

But the destroyer did not refuse a single duel; in fact, he even took off the intrusion limit of once per day and accepted any and all fighting conditions. Despite the fact that normally, after ten successive battles, even in a normal duel, a player couldn’t really move very well due to mental exhaustion, he easily fought his way through more than a hundred duels in a day, wearing down his soul itself.

At some point, the dark aura blanketing the sword grew weaker, and the armor lost its shine, but even still, the destroyer continued to fight. His win ratio dropped, and his points were eaten away bit by bit, until they finally drove him into this corner on the verge of losing all his points in this final, greatest battle in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

Several duel avatars steadily close in on the crouching knight. All of them are masters, said to currently be the strongest in the world. Among them are even a few of the Pure Colors, the leaders of the major Legions.

On the verge of death, the destroyer clings to his sword and staggers to his feet. One part of the brutal design of the visor has fallen away, allowing the merest glimpse of the smooth helmet and its single, curved line, held inside.

That mask looks up at the sky of the Accelerated World.

I—the BB player formerly known as Chrome Falcon—disappear here today.

If the rumor that your memories disappear or there’s some manipulation of your thoughts is true, then I will forget everything about the Accelerated World, even Saffron Blossom, whom I loved so much, and return to being a regular second-grade student who doesn’t even know a single big word.

But this rage of mine—this sadness—and this despair will remain.

Neither I nor Saffron Blossom wanted power. The thought of establishing a hegemony over the Accelerated World with the power of the armor never even occurred to us. All we wanted was to be able to stay in this world with everyone, forever.

Those who saw domination and destruction and pillage in the mirrored surface of the armor saw nothing more than the reflection of their own desires.

They were the ones who longed for power. The ones who killed Saffron Blossom over and over again in the cruelest manner.

So then I’ll give it to them.

I’ll leave my rage and Blossom’s suffering to this armor, to the Disaster. The next time someone craves power and puts this armor on, they will become something that attacks all Burst Linkers, destroys them, devours them. They will eat them and steal their powers and become infinitely strong. Until they are the last one. Until the end when only one remains in the wasteland of the infinitely vast Accelerated World.

Because that is the true nature of your desire.

I curse this world. I defile it. Even if I disappear temporarily here, my rage and hatred will come back to life any number of times.

Blackout.