Random thoughts drifting through his brain, Haruyuki brought an index finger toward the round swelling peeking out from beneath Lime Bell’s cloak armor.
Squoosh was the sensation that traveled back to him through his fingertip. A half second later:
“Wh-what are you doing?!” Simultaneous with the shriek was a loud clang and an enormous impact to the top of his head. Lime Bell had slammed the Enhanced Armament of her left hand, Choir Chime, into Silver Crow as hard as she could.
“Hnngh!” Tiny yellow chicks flapped around his head for a while before Haruyuki finally fully woke up and lifted his face with a gasp.
Taking a quick look around, he saw that they were no longer in the living room of the Arita house but rather a dim, tube-shaped space. To the right was an immediate dead end, but the narrow tunnel to the left looked like it continued twisting along.
This was not a dream. But it wasn’t a normal duel, either. Through some irregular phenomenon, he and Chiyuri had dived into some unknown space while they were asleep.
Just the two of them?
“Wh-where’s Taku?!” Haruyuki checked his surroundings again, but Cyan Pile’s bulk was nowhere to be found. He turned his eyes back to Chiyuri, and her fresh green avatar glared at him, hands hiding her chest, as her face resumed its worried expression.
“Dunno.” She shook her large pointed hat lightly. “I just woke up a minute ago. And when I opened my eyes, I was my duel avatar, and you were sleeping beside me, and Taku was gone.”
“He was?” Haruyuki thought for a minute below his helmet.
They had both been transformed into their duel avatars, but given that there was no timer nor any health or special-attack gauges, they were clearly not in a Normal Duel Field. Unconsciously, he tried to deploy the wings on his back, but they didn’t even twitch, despite his normally being able to at least open them when his gauge was zero. Apparently, their abilities had been deactivated.
So then he could think of only one thing. This strange phenomenon was probably—no, definitely caused by the ISS kit parasitizing Takumu. And Haruyuki and Chiyuri, asleep while directing with him, had been pulled in through the XSB cable. In other words, in a certain sense, the two of them were currently inside Takumu’s dream.
In which case, Takumu had to exist around here somewhere. The fact that they couldn’t see him was no doubt because he had moved…into that dark tunnel that extended who knew how far to their right.
“Let’s go, Chiyu. We have to find Taku.”
“Right,” Chiyuri assented immediately, apparently reaching the same conclusion at essentially the same time as he did.
Haruyuki jumped vertically up from his seated position, an impossible move with his real body, and offered Chiyuri his hand to pull her to her feet.
Rather than letting go after she stood, Lime Bell squeezed his hand. He squeezed back lightly, testing one of the tunnel’s walls with his free hand. The light-gray material wasn’t earth or cement; it was soft, with a strange elasticity. The faint warmth and the thin rings of the walls were almost like the insides of a living creature—or maybe exactly like.
The pair looked at each other and nodded before starting off briskly down into the tunnel, hand in hand.
Before he knew it, he had lost all sense of time and distance.
To begin with, it wasn’t entirely clear if they were currently accelerated or not. If they were unaccelerated, then the alarm in his home server, set for seven in the morning, would wake them up at some point. But if they were accelerated, time had basically stopped for them. They might be able to use the “burst out” command to escape from this strange place, but they were uneasy leaving Takumu. If they were accelerated, then in the few seconds it would take to rouse him in the real world, an immense amount of time would pass here.
Most likely, Takumu had had this dream the night before as well. And in it, something had interfered with his mind and poured something black into it. So right then in that moment, the same thing might be happening. And maybe what Takumu had finally begun to get back through the direct duel with Haruyuki was being stolen from him once more.
A sense of urgency quickened his pace, and before he knew it, Haruyuki was running and pulling Chiyuri along behind him. Probably feeling the same way, Chiyuri didn’t protest but intently followed the speed-type Silver Crow. The two avatars ran and ran and ran in the dark tunnel that twisted and turned before them.
If only they could use the wings on his back to fly, but for whatever reason, he apparently couldn’t use his flight ability in this place. No matter how he turned his attention to the folded-up metal fins, they didn’t move.
When it felt to him like they had gone more than five kilometers, he finally made out a faint light ahead of them.
“An exit?” Chiyuri wondered.
He nodded in reply and quickened his pace further, dashing the last few dozen meters. When they at last broke out of the tunnel, a completely unexpected scene abruptly appeared before them.
Outer space.
Although, technically, it was not quite outer space. But the inky, dark expanse seemed to spread out infinitely, adorned with countless points of light. As they stood there dumbfounded, a group of lights clustered together far above their heads, glittering beautifully like a spherical galaxy. Unlike the starry sky, however, these lights were in constant, trembling motion. One mobile light would collide with a stationary one, and then that light would begin to move and hit the next. This chain reaction continued endlessly across the galaxy. Like an enormous three-dimensional game of billiards—or a kind of network.
He couldn’t get a sense of the distances involved, so he had no real idea of the size of the shuddering galaxy. But Haruyuki intuitively knew that if he could get right up alongside them, this group of lights would spread out on a galactic scale.
While Haruyuki and Chiyuri took in the scene, the tunnel they had come out of continued to exist, a hole in space itself. A narrow bridge about two meters wide stretched out from the tunnel and continued off in a downward direction through the inky black space. They were standing at the foot of this bridge.
Haruyuki turned his gaze back to the group of resplendent stars and stood motionless, still holding Chiyuri’s right hand in his left, when he heard a faint whisper to his left.
“…Wow…”
Haruyuki nodded at this and murmured hoarsely, “What…is it…?”
“Main Visualizer,” someone responded quickly from his right side.
“Huh?!”
“Who—”
Crying out in surprise at the same time as Chiyuri, Haruyuki turned to his right. Standing gracefully near the edge of the narrow path was a slender silhouette that definitely hadn’t been there before.
It wasn’t Takumu—Cyan Pile. And of course, it wasn’t any of the other Legion members. It was a female-type duel avatar with an all-over flower-petal motif. Her armor color was a warm golden yellow, reminiscent of the sun in spring.
The instant he saw her, Haruyuki dropped his guard and whispered to Chiyuri, “It’s okay, Chiyu. She’s not an enemy.”
“Huh? You know her? So then how is she here? Isn’t this Taku’s dream?”
“Umm.” Haruyuki had a hard time finding an answer to give her. But still, he struggled to put everything he knew into an easy-to-understand form. “She’s not inside Taku—she’s in me. Or, more accurately, inside the Enhanced Armament Destiny that I have. That’s…right, isn’t it?” He had already given Chiyu a rough overview that evening of the Destiny Arc he’d summoned.
“I think so.” The golden avatar cocked her head slightly. “Although you could also say that’s not quite it. It’s true that I exist inside the Destiny, but the Destiny itself is inscribed in this world.”
“Huh? What does that…And what you said before, ‘Main…Visualizer’?”
Questions led to questions, and the mysterious girl came back with an even more surprising answer.
“In your words, it’s the
Brain Burst central server.”
Shocked to his core, Haruyuki froze in place alongside Chiyuri.
The Brain Burst central server was the so-called true form of the Accelerated World, located in some unknown place. The central server recorded all the data in Brain Burst, including the statuses of every single Burst Linker; calculated every single change; and moved all the Enemies—the very heart of the world.
And this central server—which rebuffed any and all unlawful interference, a place players weren’t even permitted to imagine the existence of—was before his eyes at this very moment. Or rather, the golden avatar was saying that the three of them were actually inside it.
“B-but how can that—? I mean, the BB server’s completely impenetrable. Even the oldest veterans say so,” he murmured in a trembling voice, and the girl smiled faintly. Or so he felt.
“That is true. But we were given just one way to allow us to touch the truth of this world. You should already know what that is.”
“Touch…the truth of this world?” Haruyuki parroted back, before opening his eyes wide with a gasp. “The Incarnate System? ‘The power of the image’…Overwriting phenomenon using imagination circuits.”
“Exactly.” The girl nodded. “A very strong and sad power.”
And this sparked a memory: This was not the first time he’d encountered the golden-yellow avatar. That had been earlier that day—actually, it was probably the day before by now—at the end of the direct duel he’d had with Takumu in his room. After being knocked flying by Takumu’s Dark Blow, he had lost the power to even get up again when she had appeared from inside him. At the time, she had indeed said, “The central system circuits were temporarily activated, and I’m able to talk to you like this.”
That central system was, in other words, the BB server, what she called the Main Visualizer. And the circuits were imagination circuits. The foundation of the Incarnate System, the path by which the power of an image was transmitted into the logic of the world.
“But…we’re not using the Incarnate System?” Having stood slightly behind Haruyuki up to that point, Chiyuri took a step forward as she spoke. “I don’t even really get what Incarnate is yet. And to begin with, we’re sleeping, both of us.”
Haruyuki looked at both avatars again and noted that, although the colors of the armor of Lime Bell and the mysterious golden-yellow avatar were totally different, the lines of their bodies were alike. Not just in the common factor of external leaf and flower-petal motifs; it was something deeper and more essential.
Turning her gaze toward Chiyuri, the girl slowly nodded and pointed at the long, dark tunnel they had come through. “That tunnel is itself an imagination circuit. You followed the circuit of the mind of your friend you are connected with and came to this place.”
“Huh? T-Taku?!”
“So then…Taku’s activating the Incarnate System right now?”
They both spoke at the same time, and the girl gently shook her head.
“This image doesn’t belong to him. The black power that’s slipped inside him made that tunnel. There.”
The girl raised her right hand to indicate the circuit that stretched out from the tunnel and disappeared into the black expanse. The floating bridge, twisting and turning along its length, appeared to be heading down to the deepest depths of the space, as if trying to escape the enormous glittering galaxy shining in the sky above.
Haruyuki stared intently and, far ahead in the unobstructed darkness, he could just barely see an avatar trudging forward, one step after another, large body pitched forward, head hanging low. He didn’t need to see the heavy blue armor or the Enhanced Armament on the right arm to know exactly who it was.
“T-Taku!!”
“Taku!!”
The two friends half screamed his name in unison, ready to start running. But a golden-yellow arm swept down in front of them to block their way.
“No. If you approach carelessly, you’ll attract its attention.”
“I-it?”
Barely holding back his impatience, Haruyuki instinctively focused his gaze on what lay ahead of Takumu. In a few seconds, almost as though his eyes had gotten used to the dark, something rose hazily into view.
Enormous was really the only word to describe it. If he had to say further, maybe a lump of black biological tissue. The amorphous, squirming flesh was enclosed in a web of countless blood vessels, pulsing. Babump. Babump. The blood vessels stretched out, branching into the surrounding space, the slender tips wriggling like tentacles.
The black lump of flesh, convulsing in a fixed rhythm, somehow resembled the galaxy of light in the sky above. However, the impression was the polar opposite. Chaos versus order. Dark versus light.
“Wh-what is that…Why is something like that in the central server?” Chiyuri asked, voice trembling.
“That…is not something the system created,” the girl replied, voice also hushed. “It’s something a BB player sowed the seeds for and slowly, carefully cultivated over many long years. The so-called contamination.”
“Spread the seeds…and cultivated…,” Haruyuki whispered, and a shudder ran through his body. He groaned in a voice that was barely audible. “I-it can’t be…the Armor of Catastrophe? Is that the true form of the armor?”
“No, that’s not it. The armor is one of the Seven Arcs, a part of the system. Destiny is over there. Look.”
The golden arm pointed somewhere near the center of the galaxy glittering in the sky far above. Following it, he saw a group of stars noticeably larger and shinier than the surrounding points of light, all lined up in the shape of a dipper. As if falling into resonance with them, Haruyuki’s eyes were pulled to the sixth star from the left.
Unlike the five that came before it, this star alone appeared to be following a small, dark companion star. If, as the girl had said, the sixth star was the true form of the Destiny, then the dark companion star next to it was the will for destruction that lived in the armor.
Haruyuki felt a strange sadness in the odd pair of stars, and he shifted his gaze to the right. The seventh star—the final Arc, Chinese name Youkou, aka the Fluctuating Light—should have been there. And indeed, he could see a massive golden point of light flickering—it looked to Haruyuki like the center of the galaxy itself.
What did that mean, then? Whatever enormous power it might hold, the Arc was supposedly, in the end, Enhanced Armament, a simple item to equip. Was this what existed at the center of the Brain Burst program itself?
Haruyuki soon threw off this momentary question. Now was not the time for considering the structure of the Accelerated World. In a few more minutes, Cyan Pile, head hanging, would walk right into that black lump of flesh. He knew that the amorphous lump was not the Armor of Catastrophe. In which case, what—
“Oh! H-Haru, look! It’s not just Taku!” Chiyuri shouted abruptly, pointing a little to Cyan Pile’s left.
Obediently, he stared hard, and could indeed make out a slender floating bridge just like the one they were standing on, complete with another avatar walking along on it.
A small duel avatar, and a form he had seen before. Sturdy arms hung down, almost dragging on the bridge, while the large upper body was pitched forward. The armor was grass green.
“B-Bush Utan!”
There was no mistake. That was Bush Utan, member of the Green Legion, little brother to Ash Roller. Only a few days earlier, he had fought Haruyuki in the Suginami area and flung around the terrifying dark Incarnate attack like he was an old hand at it.
Seemingly paying no notice to Haruyuki’s shout, Utan was also trudging toward the black lump.
And he wasn’t the end of it. Beyond him. And above, below. Countless floating bridges, hidden in the deep darkness until that point, popped up in Haruyuki’s field of view.
On every one of them, without exception, there was a single duel avatar, all moving forward lifelessly. At a rough count, there were maybe thirty—no, fifty bridges reaching out concen
trically from the lump of flesh.
And then Haruyuki finally understood what the black organism was.
The true form of the mysterious Enhanced Armament, the ISS kit. Hadn’t Takumu said so himself? That all the ISS kits were mutually linked? That when one kit got stronger, the surrounding kits also got stronger? The sight before them was precisely that “link.” Every night when they went to bed, they were lured into this world through the Brain Burst imagination circuit and connected to one another through the lump of flesh that was the kits’ true form.
Several of the duel avatars had actually already reached the lump of flesh and were kneeling before it. Black blood vessels reached out from the lump to crawl over their bodies and appeared to be exchanging some kind of fluid, or information, pulsing all the while.
“No…no…” Chiyuri knew less about the kits than Haruyuki did, but perhaps intuitively guessing at what the scene before them meant, she murmured hoarsely, “It’s awful. It’s sucking something important out of them all…and pouring in something bad instead.”
“Yeah. It is. That…that lump is making Taku feel lost. He was finally starting to get himself back after fighting me, but now, like this, he’ll…”
Haruyuki groaned quietly before turning back to the golden-yellow avatar standing to his right. “How can we stop this?!” he shouted. “That’s our friend down there! And everyone, all of them out there, is playing the same game—playing Brain Burst with us! If we…If we destroy that black lump, we can stop them. Right?! We can, right?!”
And then without waiting for an answer, Haruyuki took a step to run after Takumu, and once again, the girl swiftly raised an arm to hold him back.
It wasn’t hitting her arm that made Haruyuki stop. It was the fact that he slipped right through it. Silver Crow passed soundlessly through the girl’s right arm as though it were a video with no physical substance. Surprise brought Haruyuki’s feet to a stop. Stunned, he turned around to look at her. He’d been holding Lime Bell’s hand the whole time, so it couldn’t be that there was a rule against touching in this world.