2

At the sensation of slender fingertips caressing his cheek, Haruyuki Arita opened his eyes a crack.

The blurry world slowly came into focus. A small hand encased in pure white armor. Arms in the shape of short sleeves of the same color. Charming face mask and round, adorable scarlet eye lenses.

Haruyuki stared for a while at Ardor Maiden—level-seven Burst Linker with the power of purification, one of the Four Elements of the former Nega Nebulus—standing on her knees, hand outstretched.

A single transparent drop glittered at the tip of her slender finger. He cocked his head at the worried look on her face before realizing that the droplet had been flowing down his own face.

“Huh…oh…,” he muttered hoarsely, and hurriedly rubbed at his face with his right hand before closing his half-open helmet all the way. He turned the face of Silver Crow, the duel avatar wrapped in the half-mirrored surface, and made his excuses.

“Uh, sorry. I’m okay. I was sleeping and I had this…this superlong dream.” Here he stopped and furrowed his brow.

He had been dreaming. And in that long, long dream, Haruyuki hadn’t been Silver Crow. He had been a metal color that looked a lot like him; the shade was just a little different. But that’s all he could remember. Where he went, what he did, and what happened was blocked by a soft white wall like silk floss, and he couldn’t recall any of it.

All that was left was a faint feeling like a hole had opened up deep in his chest. And a prickling, sharp pain racing through that emptiness…a sense of loss?

…I love you, you know…

A voice he had never heard before passed through his ears, and he managed somehow to fiercely blink back the tears that threatened to spring up once more. He shook his head hard and inhaled deeply of the cool air while he was at it, pushing back the bizarre sadness before checking their surroundings again.

At some point, it had gotten dark. Above his head, clusters of stars twinkling crisply, a sight not seen in the Tokyo of the real world, even in dreams. He could see the sky because they were not inside a building, but rather a courtyard-type space. Supporting his back as he sat, legs stretched out, was a thick pillar, about a meter or so in diameter. Immediately to his right, a high wall rose up very nearly to the sky.

Nothing had changed; this was the same terrain he had seen before falling asleep. But when he at last looked down between his own legs, he realized that the thick ice that should have been there had been transformed into gravel, and he cocked his head to one side. Hurriedly looking over his shoulder, he saw that the pillar behind him was also not pale-blue ice, but rather vermilion wood.

“Huh…Did the Change happen while I was asleep?” he asked Ardor Maiden in a hushed voice, and the white-and-scarlet shrine maiden avatar nodded sharply.

“It would appear so.” Her reply was also whispered, her voice echoing with a crisp youth. “But I was asleep next to you, C, and so I didn’t notice it myself.”

The Change was the phenomenon in which the attributes of the world—the “stage” of the Unlimited Neutral Field created by the Brain Burst program—were switched periodically. When Silver Crow and Ardor Maiden had begun their nap, this place had been an Ice stage where everything was frozen solid, but he could see no sign of snow or ice now.

Almost as if the season had rolled back, the trees were brilliantly colored in fall plumage, and the pillars were wooden, the walls painted white. He very much wanted to call these attributes pure Japanese style.

“This is the Heian stage,” Ardor Maiden murmured as she spread out her scarlet armor skirt and sat neatly on her knees, matching their surroundings so perfectly she could have been part of a painting. At his unconscious staring, the small shrine maiden hung her head, seemingly embarrassed, so he hurriedly averted his eyes.

Controlling this adorable yet severe duel avatar was a girl four years younger than eighth-grade student Haruyuki, a girl named Utai Shinomiya. In fourth grade at Matsunogi Academy, a girls’ school affiliated with Umesato Junior High, she was basically a real-life sheltered princess. She had, no doubt, almost no experience with an older boy staring at her, and so he shifted his eyes away from her and around the scene once more.

Vermilion-painted pillars standing in a row from north to south. A large cobblestone street stretching out between them. The flickering orange light of countless watch fires. And the stately silhouette of the enormous palace he could see in the distance in the north.

The attributes for the Japanese-style Heian stage were essentially the ultimate match for this place. That was because they were inside the address of 1 Chiyoda, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, in the real world and also the center of the Accelerated World: the Imperial Palace of this side, the absolutely impenetrable Castle.

Haruyuki and everyone belonging to the Legion Nega Nebulus had that day—Tuesday, June 18, 2047—at just after 7:20 PM, undertaken without a doubt their greatest mission since assembling their current regiment.

The exceedingly difficult operation to rescue Ardor Maiden from where she was sealed upon the altar of Suzaku was, in terms of process, actually extremely simple.

Their leader, Kuroyukihime/Black Lotus, with the support of Chiyuri/Lime Bell and her pseudo–healing powers, was to fire a long-distance attack on Suzaku and make herself a target. Haruyuki/Silver Crow would fly at top speed assisted by Fuko/Sky Raker’s booster over Suzaku, charging down the large bridge stretching out from the south gate. He would recover Utai/Ardor Maiden at the moment she appeared once she had been given the signal to dive by Takumu/Cyan Pile before turning up into the sky at 180 degrees and escaping from the bridge.

He had believed the strategy would go well.

However, at the last of last moments, something entirely unexpected happened. Despite the fact that Haruyuki had not so much as breathed on it, Suzaku shifted its target from Black Lotus to Silver Crow and launched an extremely powerful fire-breath attack from behind him.

With the hot flames roasting his back, he had been unable to turn after grabbing Ardor Maiden from the ground, and so he had simply kept charging forward. Since the palace’s southern gates were said to open only when Suzaku was defeated, he steeled himself to slam into them when, for some reason, the gates opened the merest hint of a crack for just an instant. Long out of other options, Haruyuki and Utai plunged through it.

Haruyuki then crashed as he heard the sound of the gates closing behind him. After temporarily losing consciousness, he asked Utai, who was holding him tightly, “Um, are we maybe alive…?”

The shock of her response to that question still reverberated in his mind.

“We are alive. But…aah, but…”

“Here…This place is inside the Castle.”

“I still can’t believe it. I mean, us inside that Castle,” Haruyuki muttered, leaning up against the pillar.

Utai, kneeling neatly before him, nodded. “I was surprised when we entered the Castle, but I’m even further surprised that we live on like this after more than six hours.”

“What…D-did I sleep that long? So then this darkness isn’t a characteristic of the stage, it’s just nighttime already?” he asked hurriedly.

Although you could see your total dive time in the Unlimited Neutral Field if you opened a menu window, there were very few methods of learning the precise internal time—what time it was in the hours and minutes of this world. Somewhere in the field, there was apparently a large clock that had been marking the passage of all the time that had passed since the start of this world, but he felt like that would be a terrifying thing to see. That clock would have to be displaying a date and time greater than one thousand times seven years; i.e., seven thousand years.

“You can see the stars in the Heian stage.” Utai pointed with her small hand at the night sky above their heads. “From the position of the stars, it appears to be already very nearly midnight.”

“Uh, uh-huh. Makes sense.” Haruyuki threw his head back up at the star-filled sky.

Having dropped down in a corner of the courtyard adjacent to the Castle’s south gate approximately six hours earlier—although this was naturally in accelerated time—they had huddled together and reflected upon their own shock and feelings for a while, but they couldn’t just sit tight there forever. At every spot along the main road that stretched out due north from the south gate to the main building of the palace enshrined on the far side, they could see slow-moving groups of human-shaped Enemies.

The Enemies were about three meters tall, and thus far smaller than the Four Gods, but they were clad in thick armor and wore longswords on their hips, reminiscent of warriors from the Warring States era; they radiated an impressive force that was more than enough to set Haruyuki shivering. And on top of that, they strutted around in groups of at least three.

Moreover, they could see the shadows of warrior Enemies in the hallway outside, running along the inside of the castle wall, and when these warriors approached, armor clanging, the trapped Burst Linkers needed to take immediate action. But fighting was simply too foolhardy. Haruyuki’s HP gauge had been cut basically in half by Suzaku’s flames, and Utai wasn’t unharmed, either.

Thus, they had avoided the main road and the halls and fled to the maze of the courtyard, securing a resting place in the shadow of a pillar that seemed safe for the time being. The sun set then, and despite the fact that he was fully aware of how worried Kuroyukihime and the others outside the castle gates must have been, he had fallen asleep sitting at the base of the pillar, perhaps exhausted mentally from all the action. And now they were here.

When they had slipped into this safe zone, the setting sun had dyed the cloudy sky of the Ice stage purple, but that color was completely gone now; the stars twinkled brightly in raven heavens.

Just as Utai said, those stars seemed to perfectly reproduce the array of constellations he had learned in a full-dive lesson a long time ago. Leaning back against the pillar, he looked to the east, and his eyes stopped on a remarkably bright star glittering pure white. He was pretty sure that was…

“Lyra…So Vega?” He was talking to himself, but Utai nodded, still kneeling and looking up at the sky.

“That is correct. In Japan, we also call it Orihime.”

Haruyuki had considered all that knowledge drilled into him in class at school to be a total waste of time. He’d never expected that any of it would come in handy in a place like this, and he was suddenly delighted.

“So then below that to the right is…Aquila’s Altair.” He pointed at the starry sky. “And to the lower left is Cygnus’s Deneb, right? Umm…so which one’s Hikoboshi again?”

Giggling, Utai raised her arm, so like the sleeve of a shrine maiden’s costume. “It’s Altair. These three together are called the Summer Triangle. Although it’s June right now, so their positions are still a little low.”

“Huh. So that means the stars in the sky in the Accelerated World are based on the actual seasons…” Forgetting for a fleeting moment that they might not get out of this alive, Haruyuki was struck by a strange emotion and stared single-mindedly up at the sky.

The point of reproducing real terrain from images from the social cameras might have been to increase the number of strategic and tactical elements of the game. That made sense. But no matter which way he looked at it, the night sky was just scenery. No player would complain if the game had simply stuck up a single image made up of random points of light.

But there had to be some kind of intent or statement being made in going so far as to place the stars in the same positions as in the real world and reproduce even the movements of the constellations with the seasons; most likely the assertion that this wasn’t just a game, it wasn’t just an imaginary world.

“The early Burst Linkers—apparently, they used to use the expression ‘BB players,’” Utai began to relate quietly, abruptly bringing both hands back down to her knees. “They, too, when they realized that the night sky in the Accelerated World was exactly the same as reality’s—albeit the beautiful stars shone brightly with a clarity you could never dream of in Tokyo where the artificial lights are simply too bright—felt something uniformly. That’s the reason that the prominent Legions were given names evocative of space.”

“What? Are there really that many space names?” Haruyuki twisted his head around, and the childlike shrine maiden allowed a faint, bitter smile to rise up on her trim mask.

“All of the Legions of the Seven Kings have one. Our Nega Nebulus as well, a dark interstellar cloud…Although strictly speaking, it’s apparently a ‘dark nebula’ in English, but the name is from that concept. And the Red Legion’s ‘Prominence’ is the jet shooting up from the surface of the sun. The Blue Legion’s ‘Leonids’ is a meteor shower in the constellation Leo.”

“W-wow. So that’s why…”

I just know Chiyu and Taku both realized this right from the start and felt like it went without saying. I’m so glad Utai’s telling me before I have to hear them all shout, You didn’t know?!

Whispering all kinds of reassuring thoughts to himself, Haruyuki asked, “So that means the White Legion’s, um, ‘Oscillatory Universe’ isn’t because the Legion Master’s a white Shiratori bird or anything, but because it’s actually a name related to space?”

At this, another smile with the slightest element of exasperation bled onto Utai’s face, but she quickly recomposed her expression. “Yes,” she said, in a whisper that was slightly tense for some reason, as she lowered her eyes. “‘Oscillatory universe’ means…a vibrating universe. But I haven’t learned about that in school yet, so I don’t understand the precise meaning.”

“V-vibrating universe…”

I mean, the universe doesn’t actually shake or vibrate or anything.

He shook his head from side to side, but eighth-grade student Haruyuki couldn’t remember ever having heard those words in his science classes. To begin with, he wasn’t sure if this level of concept would even show up in the compulsory education curriculum. He decided to look it up later if he remembered and turned his eyes up once more to the starry heavens.

Above the Summer Triangle, at precisely the pinnacle, several fairly weak stars were huddled together. He was pretty sure that was Hercules. To the left, Draco, the hundred-headed dragon Ladon defeated, rose up into the sky nearby the hero. And then farther to the left was a group of stars so bright they approached the brightness of the large triangle.

Ursa Major. The tail shone especially brightly. He learned in class that because of this brightness, the tail had been a constellation all by itself in ancient China.

The dipper shape with the long handle.

The seven stars of the Big Dipper.

Thmmp. He felt his heart jump abruptly. In the back of his mind, he felt small sparks firing, and his eyes were drawn to the center of the three stars that made up the dipper handle. He felt like this star alone, the name of which he didn’t know, was pulsing in sync with those sparks in him.

A pulsating throb descended slowly from the center of his brain into his central nervous system. It flowed through his neck, past his shoulders, down the center of his back, and reached the space between his shoulder blades. Thmmp. It hurt. Thmmp. Thmmp. The sensation was both as though his own body itself were in pain and also as if some foreign body had embedded itself in—

“…C. C!”

At his shoulders being shaken gently, Haruyuki lifted his face with a gasp. Immediately before him, Ardor Maiden looked on, a worried light shining in her scarlet eyes.

Hurriedly, he shook his head and mumbled an answer. “S-sorry. I just sort of spaced out…”

“Is…that so? Then…I must have seen wrong. My apologies. Your body—For a moment, it seemed as though something shadowlike was covering it…”

“……”

He felt like he had heard her words somewhere else. And not that long ago. In the middle of the Hermes’ Cord race a week before, when the shuttle was racing through warp space, Sky Raker had made a similar remark…

“I-it’s just your imagination. I’m not doing anything.” His response was essentially the same as it had been with Sky Raker, and then, unconsciously glossing over a nebulous unease, he added, “More important, we should get to thinking about what we’re going to do now. It’s not like we can just sit in this safe zone forever.”

“Yes. That’s…You’re right.” Utai nodded largely, as if to shake away her concerns, and then whirled her head around.

At that moment, they were hiding in the Castle’s plaza, about fifty meters to the northeast of the southern gate. On the other side of the vermilion pillars, directly to the west, was the cobblestone main road stretching from north to south. Spreading out to the east was the complicated Japanese garden–style maze they had stepped into. The corridor along the circular castle walls was south of them.

Since fearsome Enemies patrolled a fixed course on the large main road and the corridor, it would be difficult to slip through either of those. And from the garden to the east, he could hear loud splashing noises and the heavy slithering of something massive crawling around from time to time; he was very much not interested in going that way.

The one place where they might be able to move was the narrow space between the rows of pillars and the maze of the garden, a course toward the north hiding behind pillars as they went, but there was no exit to the north—only the palace, which was the main building of the Castle. Inside there would be what was called the Inner Sanctuary, if it kept with the design of the Heian stage. The place was all so reminiscent of an enormous shrine, Haru had no doubt that monsters even fiercer than the current warrior-type Enemies would be parading around.

Given that their goal wasn’t to storm the Castle, it was to return alive with Utai—Ardor Maiden—to a portal, they needed to avoid carelessly approaching the inner sanctuary at least, where they could get caught in an even worse Unlimited EK situation.

“Most likely…” Returning her gaze to Haruyuki after taking in their surroundings again, Utai opened her mouth as if thinking out loud, still seated neatly on her knees. “Lotus, Raker, and Bell should have already returned to the real world through the portal at the police station. When you’re separated from your comrades during a battle in the Unlimited Neutral Field, the general idea is that rather than continuing to risk the danger, those who can escape, escape.”

“Yeah, makes sense.”

The younger girl continued in a childlike, yet clear tone. “Then in that case, if a safety’s been set, those who left first would activate it, and then an assessment of the situation would take place in the real world. Thus, if we continue to wait here like this, there will soon be a discussion, and in the meantime, we will be able to return to your house. Or we should be able to.”

A safety was when, instead of connecting Neurolinkers wirelessly to the global net, Burst Linkers connected using a wired connection through a home server or mobile router. Doing so allowed their comrades who managed to escape before them to cut the circuit of this stepping-stone and log them out for the moment even if they couldn’t reach a portal in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

Currently, Haruyuki, Utai, Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Takumu, and Chiyuri were gathered in Haruyuki’s living room, their Neurolinkers connected in a daisy chain. If, having made it alive to the portal at the police station at the base of the southern bridge of the Castle, Kuroyukihime and the others pulled out the XSB cable connecting Haruyuki’s Neurolinker to the Arita home server, in that instant, Haruyuki and Utai would automatically burst out.

However, Utai moved her avatar’s mouth again, as if lost in further thought. “But, the situation being what it is, Lotus and the others are no doubt unsure. Because regardless of anything else, it was a one-in-a-million miracle that you and I slipped through the watch of Suzaku. We will likely never have another chance to investigate the interior of the Castle.”

“Never?……I dunno. If we charge at the gate with the same strategy again, maybe we could…” Naturally, he had no desire to do this again, but he gave voice to the idea as a possibility at the very least.

“C, please look over there.” Utai raised her right hand to point across Haruyuki’s shoulder to the southwest. “That’s the inside of the south gate.”

“O-okay.” He turned around and carefully poked his face out from the shadow of the pillar behind him to see an enormous castle gate soaring up fifty meters ahead.

The gate doors, made up of two large panels side by side, separated the inside and the outside of the Castle absolutely, with an impressive mass and density. He could hardly believe that six hours earlier, the seam between those panels had opened up barely half a meter and allowed them to pass through.

Utai was pointing at the very center of the doors. Straining his eyes to see the spot, a place where the light of the watch fires on the ground just barely reached, he realized he did indeed see something large there.

Maybe a bas-relief? A square metal plate, about three or so meters on each side, connected the doors. Some kind of detailed engraving appeared to be carved into its surface, but it had a gravity that made it seem like more than simply a decorative object.

“…Oh…”

Squinting harder, the design of the relief suddenly snapped into clarity before his eyes. An enormous bird, wings spread wide to both sides, sharp beak open at the end of a long head. The God Suzaku itself.

“A seal…for the gate?” Haruyuki murmured unconsciously, and felt Utai nodding next to him.

“I think so, too. C, I believe you likely haven’t noticed this, but in fact, at the point in time when we charged through those gates, that seal had been destroyed by someone.”

“Wh-whaaaat?!” Unthinkingly, he cried out in surprise and hurried to clamp his hands over his mouth. Lowering his voice, he asked urgently, “D-destroyed?! So the seal’s not actually supposed to split in the middle? It was broken?”

“That is how it looked to me. Rather than the center being vertically divided in a straight line, it was cut into a diagonal cross, as though an enormous sword had sliced into it twice.”

To reproduce the situation for him, Ardor Maiden stretched out five fingers and drew an X in the air with her right hand. As she lowered it, she continued in an even quieter voice.

“However, a few seconds after we charged in and the gates closed, the seal was completely restored, as you can see there. In this world, any kind of lock or seal is a metaphor for a system lock. If that seal had been functioning properly, the main gate most certainly would not have opened without the defeat of Suzaku. In other words, it was precisely because something—or some one—cut that seal from the inside with a sword that the gate opened for us when we approached it, even if only for a moment. That is what I believe.”

Still staring at the metal bas-relief reflecting the light of the torches in the distance, Haruyuki opened and closed his mouth beneath his silver surface any number of times. He sorted through his thoughts and finally put the first of them into words. “So that means a Burst Linker got into this Castle before us…and deliberately destroyed that seal for someone coming along later?”

“…Yes, I think so.”

“B-but, like, Suzaku’s going strong out there. So then, how on earth did that Burst Linker get into the Castle? If that seal automatically restores itself after the gates open and close, like you saw it do, Mei—I mean, it can’t have been broken since the birth of the Accelerated World. And there’s no way for this whoever to break through the gate other than…defeating Suzaku…”

Hands on her knees once more, Utai gently shook her head.

“That I don’t know. To obtain any further information, it’s likely necessary to enter the inner sanctuary of the Castle.” Her words dropped to a whisper toward the end, and Haruyuki turned his gaze north, toward the silhouette of the inner sanctuary cutting a black sheet out of the starry sky.

Go in there? The very center of the center of the Accelerated World…?

We can’t. We totally can’t do something that outrageous. First of all, the entrance to the inner sanctuary’s obviously gonna be guarded by Enemies even more incredible than those terrifying warriors. How are we supposed to break through something like that…

He pulled his shoulders in tightly with a shudder, his pessimistic thoughts taking charge in his brain. And then Haruyuki got the feeling that he was watching a mysterious scene dimly projected on a screen somewhere deep in his brain.

Although his own avatar was definitely still seated on the gravel, another self stood up and advanced to the north. Hiding behind the pillars from the gazes of the warrior Enemies patrolling the main road, he approached the inner sanctuary, cautiously but at a steady pace. Rather than aiming for the strictly guarded main entrance, he had his sights set on a single window on the white wall a few dozen meters east of it…

“—setting aside the matter of the seal, I believe that at any rate, we do have to move.”

Utai’s voice in his ears shattered the bizarre vision. He opened his eyes with a gasp and blinked repeatedly. Seemingly paying this no mind, Utai kept her eyes on the inner sanctuary in the distance and continued speaking quietly.

“If we wait here like this, at some point, Lotus and the others will force us to Burst Out. But if, for instance, we do manage to return to the real world for a time, the next time we use the “unlimited burst” command, we will appear here in the inner garden of the Castle again. There’s not such a difference between that and Unlimited EK.”

“Oh…y-yeah, right.” Haruyuki simply agreed as he tried to get his head together somehow. “So then this mission isn’t over until me and you, Shino—Mei—leave properly through a portal somewhere. To do that, we have to open that gate again, get outside, dodge Suzaku’s attack, and reach the police station on the other side of the bridge…or find a new portal inside the Castle…”

“Yes, that’s exactly right.” Ardor Maiden nodded crisply, and Haruyuki stared into her scarlet eyes before deliberately opening his mouth again.

“Mei. I have a proposal. I don’t have any real reason or confidence, but…I want to try heading for the inner sanctuary. I don’t know why, but…I think we can make it.” As he stared at the child shrine maiden cocking her head slightly, his own avatar, which had been sitting cross-legged on the gravel, shifted to sit properly on its knees without his being aware of it. He clenched his hands lightly on his knees, straightened his back, and continued speaking.

“Naturally, I get that the worst-case scenario is we’re killed by some Enemy stronger than those warriors and get stuck in an Unlimited EK in the Castle. I know we shouldn’t risk that danger on a gut feeling. But, still, I want to go…I kinda feel like…we maybe…have to go…”

It was a fair bit of work for Haruyuki to get all this out, and toward the end, his voice turned into his usual mumble, and his shoulders started to drop. There was no way he’d be able to persuade a very veteran Burst Linker two levels higher than he was.

“Understood.” Utai nodded.

“What?!” he cried out in surprise.

The shrine maiden let a little laugh out and, while still kneeling, deftly moved to bring her knees right up alongside his. From this position, she reached out with her right hand and gently placed it on top of his clenched fist.

“C. Back there, you ignored Lotus’s order to retreat, and you rescued me when I appeared on the altar, all while being chased by Suzaku’s flames. In that instant, I understood that you are a person I can trust—someone I should trust. No, actually, perhaps I knew it from the time we first met, from the time I saw you all alone in the yard at Umesato Junior High School, so earnestly cleaning out the animal hutch.”

“Th-that’s—I mean, I, like, totally, it’s just…” Haruyuki hung his head deeply, his usual stammering reaching new levels. “I never think—I always mess up. I mean, that time cleaning, I totally sprayed you with water.”

Perhaps remembering it, Utai let a giggle slip out and held Haruyuki’s hand even more tightly. “I believe I told you: that true strength is moving forward without giving up, even if you lose or fall down or fail. If we are killed by Enemies aiming for the depths of the inner sanctuary, I have faith that you will manage something there.”

They were kind yet harsh words. But Haruyuki lifted his face and firmly met Utai’s eyes, glittering brightly before nodding deeply.

“Yeah. I’ll work something out. We’re going home alive…to everyone waiting for us in the real world.”