Here, Kuroyukihime closed her mouth. But Haruyuki felt certain that he had caught the words she couldn’t speak, even through the direct cable that still connected them.
Another smile and a faint murmur. “So, Haruyuki? Have we crossed those two meters?”
He couldn’t say anything in reply. The feelings welling up in him were simply too great and filled his heart. Instead, he mustered up every bit of courage he had and raised both hands to wrap them around the pale right hand she still held in the air.
It was warm. The same warmth as the hand of Black Lotus that he had touched for a brief instant in the Steel stage. It seeped into the palms of his hands, to be transmitted to his nervous system and shine golden in the center of his consciousness.
Kuroyukihime raised her left hand as well and placed it over Haruyuki’s right. The only things that existed in the world filled with warm light were their four hands intertwined and her calm, beautiful, smiling face.
The girl slowly lowered her long lashes, changing the angle of her face. As if sucked in, Haruyuki leaned his torso forward slightly. Kuroyukihime also brought her body closer in the same way, eyes still closed. Now there were only a mere fifteen centimeters between him and her pale face—and its peach lips. They drew a little closer. Down to ten centimeters.
The clatter of the door sliding open put a stop to things.
Kuroyukihime pulled herself away from him so fast, she practically teleported. In one swoop, she yanked out the direct cable, leapt off the bed, and returned to the chair beside it. A mere two seconds later, the edge of a white curtain was lifted, and the face of Ms. Hotta appeared.
“How’re you feeling, Arita?”
Haruyuki was frozen in place, eyes and mouth all gaping, and the teacher furrowed her brow.
“Your face is pretty red. Maybe your temperature’s gone up again?”
“No. I’m fine.” This was as much of an answer as he could manage.
Meanwhile, Kuroyukihime sat neatly on the chair, face perfectly calm, not even a drop of sweat on her forehead. Her powers of mental control were formidable, truly. At some point, her hands had even picked up the thermos once more.
As she proffered the straw of that very thermos in a gesture perfectly befitting a health aide, Haruyuki had no choice but to accept it and suck.
8
During the ten-minute break at the end of second period, Haruyuki changed out of his gym clothes, back into his uniform, and returned to eighth grade’s class C.
Immediately after he pulled the door open and set foot inside, he was showered in no small amount of applause, and he froze in place. When he thought about it, though, he didn’t know what it’d be like when a frail girl collapsed from anemia or something, but if a boy collapsed from trying too hard in a regular gym class, that was basically comedy gold. Pulling in his head and bobbing it in small bows, Haruyuki dashed to his seat, sat down just as the bell sounded for third period, and heaved a sigh of relief.
When he lifted his face, his eyes met those of Chiyuri, who was looking back with an expression of concern from her desk, which sat kitty-corner to the front and right of his. He gave her a nod to say that he was fine and glanced back at Takumu, behind him, searching for brief eye contact.
Takumu’s expression was actually apologetic; he apparently thought it was because of his advice about the image being important that Haruyuki had tried so hard that he collapsed.
It’s not your fault. In fact, thanks to you, I realized something important. Thank you. Putting this thought into his gaze, he started to grin, and Takumu also finally turned the corners of his mouth up slightly.
During third and fourth periods, lunch, and then his afternoon classes, Haruyuki studied with half his brain while the other half thought furiously about what second-level Incarnate he could find and nurture.
He understood that he had a far more pressing duty to focus on at that moment: Castle Escape Mission Part II, scheduled for seven o’clock that evening and closing in fast. He had to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field with Ardor Maiden aka Utai Shinomiya, meet the mysterious young azure samurai Trilead Tetroxide again, and, with his help, return alive from the Castle and the territory of the Four Gods. Considering the fact that they would be plunged into the terrifying state of Unlimited Enemy Kill if they were defeated by even one of the samurai avatars patrolling the interior of the Castle, much less the God Suzaku, no matter how much he focused on the mission, it would never be too much.
But Haruyuki simply couldn’t stop himself from thinking about his own Incarnate. Because at the moment, he had one other situation he couldn’t put off for later: the fact that he was going to initiate his eternal rival—or that’s how it had turned out at any rate—the fin de siècle motorcycle-riding Burst Linker, Ash Roller.
When Ash had abruptly asked him to teach him the Incarnate System in their last duel before school, Haruyuki had been stunned into silence for almost a full five seconds. Once he somehow managed to get his brain moving again, the very first thing he asked was, to him, the most natural question in the world.
“Wh-why me?”
And the century-end rider had said, “It’s just, you’re, you know. You’re, like, Master Raker’s apprentice, right? So then, like, you’re my junior or my bro or something?”
It took him another second to understand that bro meant younger apprentice, and he stopped himself from retorting that bro didn’t exactly make clear what their relationship was at all. He instead replied with a more practical question. “Th-then shouldn’t you get Raker to teach you properly? You’re her child, Ash. I’m sure she’d teach you very nicely, regardless of the fact that you’re in different Legions. She’d make sure to take the time and do it right.”
“That’s just it. That ‘do it right’ is the whole problem.”
Haruyuki caught an echo of something like fear in the voice slipping out from beneath the skull mask and instantly understood what the issue was for Ash. It was like he was scared—no, he actually was scared. Of the terrifying spartan teaching style in which Sky Raker aka Fuko Kurasaki “did it right” and pushed Haruyuki off the top of the old Tokyo Tower to initiate him into the Incarnate System two months earlier.
“Um,” Haruyuki said, after staring at Ash Roller out of the corner of his eye for a while. “This might sound a bit grandiose, but…the Incarnate System isn’t so easy as that. I mean, just getting it without working hard like some dodgy Neurolinker study kit or something—”
“Don’t be a Chatty Cathy about every tiny deet! I get it! Mighty me’s totally comprendés!” Ash shouted, and the palm of a gloved hand was thrust before Haruyuki’s eyes. “But let me just say this. The lesson you got from Master was the mild version, special for guests!”
“Huh? Th-that was?”
“One hundred percent! And, like, basically, my masterful self’s, like…Dunno if I should say it like this, but I’m not planning to learn the Incarnate System and then go running around the Unlimited Neutral Field ripping danger dudes to shreds or something. Only gonna use the Incarnate tech in one fight—maybe just one time. All I gotta do is slam tough-guy action on Kid U, who’s swallowed up by the ISS kit, and get him to wake up already. That’s all.”
At that unexpected pronouncement, Haruyuki considered the skull face’s profile.
Face turned up to the sky of the stage, Ash Roller muttered in a quiet voice tinged with an usual gravity, “For my mighty self, Brain Burst’s basically nothing but a fighter.”
And when Ash said this, Haruyuki couldn’t bring himself to reject his rival’s request. Because Haruyuki himself was the one who told Ash Roller that now was the time to strike a blow against Bush Utan and destroy his ISS kit.
The duel time ended there, so Haruyuki didn’t get the chance to say yes or no to Ash’s wish, but he was sure his intention—that he had resolved to grant this wish—had been conveyed to his longtime rival.
As half his brain spun and whirled in thought, the bell sounding th
e end of sixth period rang, and the air in the classroom suddenly perked up.
The sixth-period teacher left, to be replaced by their homeroom teacher, Sugeno, and the short homeroom session began. At the end of the various announcements, when the matter of Arita passing out in first period was brought up, Haruyuki gratefully accepted the wise words “Giving it your all’s fine, but the golden rule of the athlete is to properly self-monitor,” and then the bell for the end of the day rang.
He first talked briefly with Chiyuri and Takumu about the plans for that evening before his friends ran off to track and kendo practice, respectively. They confirmed the general gist of things—once they were done with practice and club work, they would change and meet at Haruyuki’s, have a meeting with the whole Legion, and start the Castle escape mission—and then parted for the time being.
Haruyuki changed into his sneakers at the outside doors, and while he headed toward the rear school yard by himself to take care of his club duties, he kept intently asking himself the same question.
Perhaps it was because these doubts still existed in the bottom of his heart that he had felt a slight impatience with Kuroyukihime in the nurse’s office, as he sought instruction in Incarnate.
If it was just about technical knowledge of the Incarnate System—a conscious use of imagination circuits, which were a subtextual control system in Brain Burst—he could brag that he had learned it to some extent. But Incarnate was not simply a technique. It held an overwhelming power outside the game rules, but it also carried the terrifying risk of the player’s own mind being pulled down into dark places. This was no mere metaphor. For Burst Linkers who unlocked a negative will, even their personalities in the real world were twisted. Like the marauder Dusk Taker. And Takumu the previous day.
If he was going to initiate someone into the Incarnate, he had to make sure to carefully warn them not to be pulled to that dark side. It probably wouldn’t be enough to explain the danger in words. First, he would need to show actual examples of the miracles that the Incarnate could bring about. Like Sky Raker making her wheelchair dance without using her limbs or Black Lotus turning her sword into a hand.
From this point of view, Haruyuki’s Laser Sword and Laser Lance were fairly weak. As a phenomenon, they were nothing more than one-off attack techniques. There was any number of other Burst Linkers who had special attacks with the same range and power.
If he really intended to lecture Ash Roller on the Incarnate System, then rather than the four basic technique types, Haruyuki would have to show him what Kuroyukihime called a second-stage power. If he couldn’t, then he probably wasn’t qualified to teach anyone about Incarnate.
“Still, that said…,” Haruyuki muttered with a sigh as he rounded the second school building from the east side and walked along the mossy backyard.
In the nurse’s office, Kuroyukihime had said that to learn the second stage of Incarnate, he needed to face his own flesh-and-blood self head-on and invert the mental scars that were the template for his avatar, in order to give birth to an image of hope. But to be honest, Haruyuki didn’t really understand himself why he was born as Silver Crow—a metal color with slender limbs, a smooth head, and ten metal fins.
He’d wanted a thin body because he was fat. He’d dreamed of flying because he lived his life crawling along on the ground. It was easy to say that. But for some reason, he felt like that wasn’t the whole of it. After all, this theory had nothing to say about the reason for the metal color.
Then he suddenly heard a faint voice: And it’s basically for sure that peeps with a mental-scar-shell strength that goes beyond a certain level turn into metal colors…
He froze on the spot and looked around.
It was the slightly husky voice of a girl. But there was no one in the dim yard. He listened hard once more, but the only sounds he heard were the shouts of the sports teams practicing on distant grounds and the members of the band tuning their instruments in the music room.
But he wasn’t just hearing things. Because even if Haruyuki had known the phrase “mental scar shell,” he didn’t know any girls around here who used the Kansai dialect the voice spoke in.
Throb.
Suddenly, a point in the center of his back, between his shoulder blades, ached fiercely. Unthinkingly, he staggered and put a hand out against the wall of the school building beside him. Throb. Throb. The pain just wouldn’t go away.
It wasn’t muscle pain from gym first period. Haruyuki already knew this pain wasn’t coming from some abnormality within his body.
“Ngh…Why, now…that,” he muttered hoarsely, clenching his fists and enduring the agony.
Exactly. That: the Armor of Catastrophe parasitizing Silver Crow, the Enhanced Armament “the Disaster,” born from the mutation of the Destiny Arc—it was excited.
Smash. In his ears, a fierce bestial voice roared, entirely different from the previous voice. Kill. All of them…Rip them apart…Chew them up…Eat them!
Haruyuki, still leaning against the wall, groaned at the heat of the rage and hatred that enveloped this voice; it instilled a terrible fear in him.
Two weeks before, in the final stage of the Hermes’ Cord race, Haruyuki had been carried away by his rage toward Rust Jigsaw and summoned the armor. Although it had basically controlled him for a time, Chiyuri’s special attack Citron Call Mode II had rewound time for his avatar, and the armor had returned to a parasitic state—a fragment of a hook wire left behind by the fifth Chrome Disaster, Cherry Rook.
He hadn’t heard the armor’s voice since, but the previous evening, when he was fighting Takumu, who was on the verge of being swallowed up by the ISS kit, Haruyuki had tried to summon the original form of the armor, the Destiny, to bring him back. And although it hadn’t been the Armor of Catastrophe itself, the parasitic element might have awoken in the summoning process.
But. As he endured the pulses of lightning-like pain, Haruyuki felt something was out of place somehow. This was…different from the voice of the armor before, he felt. The brutal destructive urge was the same, but behind that lay some massive emotion, beyond the anger and hatred. An emotion that howled and raged and…wailed.
If he simply closed his eyes and ears to it, the voice would pass at some point, but Haruyuki unconsciously tried to tune his consciousness to it.
Instantly, an intense pain, the most powerful yet, enough to make him dizzy, raced up his spine to the center of his head, and he fell to his knees on the ground. His hearing was filled with a ferocious howling.
Smash. Smash. Smash smash eat eat eat eat eat eat!!
…This is…sadness…? Are you crying…?
The response to Haruyuki’s questioning was a third merciless burst of pain. Unable to even groan now, he squeezed his eyes shut and pitched forward, about to fall onto the moss-covered ground.
Before he could, someone supported his shoulders with small hands from the front. A soft, gentle sensation enveloped his upper body. Before he could comprehend that someone was holding him up, Haruyuki wrapped his arms around that someone, clinging to them for dear life.
The someone was cool, a temperature to soothe and calm and absorb blazing crimson flames. Each time the small hands patted his back, the pulses of pain receded.
He let out a long breath and released the tension from his stiffened body.
Brain still half-frozen, he absently opened his eyes to see thin concentric lines of deep crimson against a black background, like the sparks from incense on a summer evening. It took a little time for him to realize they were pupils—eyes.
He pulled his head back just a little, and his field of view grew. Fifteen centimeters in front of him was the face of a young girl, large eyes open wide and looking worried.
Neatly trimmed front fringe. The rest of her hair was tied back with a slender ribbon. A surprisingly thin neck, and a white dress-type uniform below that. A brown school backpack on the shoulders—
“Shi…nomi…ya…?” Haruyuki asked hoa
rsely, and the girl nodded sharply.
Utai Shinomiya, the nonschool member of the Umesato Junior High Animal Care Club, of which Haruyuki was president. Fourth grader in the elementary division of Matsunogi Academy, a member of the same business group as Umesato. And in the Accelerated World, Ardor Maiden, a level-seven Burst Linker who had once occupied one corner of the Four Elements, the upper echelon of the first Nega Nebulus.
Haruyuki let out a thin sigh of relief at the appearance of someone he could trust unconditionally and tried to pull his face—still far too close to hers—back a little more.
But he couldn’t. Because both his arms were wrapped tightly around Utai’s body, which was small even for her age.
After looking down for about two seconds at Utai’s dress and his own round stomach pressed together, Haruyuki finally realized his position—as though he was unafraid of divine wrath raining down on him—and shouted out, “Noheeeah!”
His arms swung out to the sides, spring-loaded, and he jumped back half a meter, still on his knees. “I—! I-I’m sorry! I-it’s not like that. That’s not what…” He waved both hands wildly.
A red system message popped up in the middle of his virtual desktop. Without checking that it was a request for an ad hoc connection, he hit the YES button. A chat window had no sooner appeared in the bottom part of his field of view than Utai’s adorable fingers were typing furiously in the air.