“H-hey, Haru! I’m the one who should be doing that!” Chiyuri’s exasperated voice also sounded choked. And then she bumped her own body up against Haruyuki’s shoulder.
Feeling the warmth of his two childhood friends, Haruyuki continued to simply spill hot tears.
Thank goodness. Abruptly, he heard a faint voice deep in his own head. You managed to save your friend.
No mistake, it was the voice of the mysterious golden girl avatar. Stifling his sobs, Haruyuki thought back to her:
Thanks. It’s all thanks to you.
Hee-hee. I didn’t do anything. The light of your heart shone through the darkness. I want you to keep walking ahead on this road you believe in. If you keep collecting all these lights, I’m sure the time will come when even his deep despair will be healed.
He didn’t really understand the meaning of those words at that moment, but Haruyuki murmured, as if guided by something, Yeah. I promise. I’m definitely going to release you—you and him from the cycle of Catastrophe.
…Thank you. I believe in you…
The voice receded and disappeared.
Finally getting himself under control, Haruyuki wiped away his tears with the sleeve of his pajamas and lifted his chin, shouting forcefully to hide his embarrassment. “W-we ran until we practically died, and now I’m starving. I’m gonna go check if there’s anything in the fridge.” He pulled out the direct cable, stood up, and padded quickly into the kitchen.
“Hey now!” Chiyuri’s exasperated voice chased him. “We might have been running, but it was actually in a dream, you know!”
Which was followed by Takumu’s laughter.
“Ha-ha-ha! Haru, bring me something, too!”
Haruyuki warmed up frozen cubes of clam chowder for three, divided it evenly into soup cups, and then carried these out to the dining room table.
A glance at the wall clock revealed that it was already nearly six in the morning. If he canceled the shade mode on the window glass, the morning sun would come pouring in from the east. It was an hour earlier than he usually got up, but he figured he might as well stay up now. Haruyuki let out a long yawn.
After putting away their bedding and sitting down at the table, the three friends took a sip of the steaming soup. They all let out a sigh and looked at one another.
“Taku.” The first to speak was Chiyuri, her face quite serious. “Umm, so I guess we can assume the ISS kit is completely gone now?”
“Yeah, I think so. I don’t have any data or anything to back it up, but that’s what my gut’s telling me.” There was no hesitation or doubt in Takumu’s immediate reply.
“Rather than breaking down endurance in the duel stage,” Haruyuki started thinking out loud, “it’s like, um, like you smashed the saved data in the server itself. And it’s actually surprising you managed to survive that.”
“‘Server.’ Haru, are you saying that place was Brain Burst’s…?”
“Yeah.” He nodded lightly at Takumu’s question. “The Brain Burst central server. That’s what she said.”
Takumu had woken up only when they were on the verge of escaping that world, so Haruyuki and Chiyuri took turns explaining what they had experienced there. The long, dark tunnel and the infinite expanse beyond it. The galaxy of shuddering lights, the inky black of the lump of flesh. And the mysterious golden-yellow avatar who had appeared from within Haruyuki to teach them so many things.
“Right.” Glasses still off, Takumu fell silent for a while, the look on his face indicating he was in his usual “full professor” mode. After a few seconds of fiercely racking his brain, he lifted his head and spoke crisply. “Haru, do you remember? Last night, before we went to sleep, we talked about the vulnerability of the ISS kit.”
“V-vulnerability…Right, we did talk about how, if it has this kind of terrifying power, then it has to have a vulnerability to match, right?”
“Right. You definitely got to the heart of that vulnerability before. The ISS kit automatically opens an imagination circuit while the person who has it equipped is sleeping at night, which connects the wearer’s consciousness directly to the central server. Then it does this parallel-processing-of-evil kind of thing with the other wearers, to strengthen the kit’s main body and its terminals.”
Takumu’s words sent a shiver through the other two.
“Th-this is seriously serious,” Chiyuri murmured. “Isn’t that beyond what a player could actually do, though?”
“Yeah.” Takumu bit his lip lightly. “To be honest, I have no idea what kind of logic could create an Enhanced Armament with such an ability. But…if there’s one thing I can say, it’s that the Brain Burst program had this function right from the start. To open the imagination circuit as a dream and connect to the central server.”
“Huh? That’s…?”
“Haru, you remember, right? What happened the night after you installed Brain Burst?”
“Oh!” he cried out and met Chiyuri’s eyes before bobbing his head up and down.
There was no way he could forget. After getting the program from Kuroyukihime the previous fall, Haruyuki had had a long, long nightmare, although he couldn’t remember the details. The program had picked through this dream and created Haruyuki’s other self, the duel avatar Silver Crow. His avatar data would have been registered in the central server at the same time—or rather, it was only natural to think this process happened within the central server.
So that night, Haruyuki had indeed been in communication with the server while he slept. It was basically the same as what had happened to Takumu now.
“So then the parallel processing every night is the key to the strength of the ISS kits,” Takumu continued, still thinking it through as he sipped his soup. “But at the same time, it’s a massive opening. I mean, however you look at it, that means calling the Burst Linkers right up to the main body. It’s not a problem if everyone’s under the control of the kit like I was, but…”
Takumu lifted his head and smiled meaningfully, and Haruyuki returned his grin. “The guys who made the kits probably never imagined their victims would be directing with another Burst Linker while they slept.”
“And even more, that that Burst Linker would be able to use a range-expansion Incarnate technique to attack from outside the range of the main body.”
The two boys laughed together, and, watching them, Chiyuri shook her head in mock exasperation but soon spoke in a half-smiling, half-grumbling way. “So then the bond between us was the winner! Right! Aah, honestly, I just want to meet whoever’s pulling the strings right now and say, ‘Take that!’”
She drained the rest of her soup in one gulp and slammed the cup back down onto the table before shaking a head of short, tousled hair and opening her mouth again. “Hey, Taku? At the end of that dream, you cut down the kit’s main body with Cyan Blade, right? Did that destroy the kit?”
“…No.” Takumu’s face grew serious again, and he shook his head slowly. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get any feedback to indicate that I destroyed it completely. But I definitely damaged the accumulated ‘evil will’ and the circuit it was using to transmit that. The clones in the same cluster as me probably lost a fair bit of power.”
The cluster Takumu was talking about was the group of Burst Linkers with the same ISS kit origin—in Takumu’s case, Magenta Scissor—or people who got copies of it later. If he hadn’t stopped the kit when it split off from him and tried to parasitize Haruyuki at the end of the battle the previous evening, Haruyuki would have become a member of that cluster as well.
“So, then, if we were thinking of freeing Bush Utan and Olive Grab from the kit, now would be the time,” Haruyuki muttered, remembering the figure of the dark-green avatar walking beside Takumu in the nightmare.
“Yeah. Right now, you wouldn’t have to go into the central server. You could probably destroy the kits in a normal duel. Of course, regular techniques wouldn’t work, but I think it’d be possible with Incarnate techniques.”
?
??Got it. I’ll pass the info along to his ‘big brother.’ I wish we could do something ourselves, but we can’t move today.”
Chiyuri and Takumu looked up at the clock on the wall. The date and time it showed was six thirty AM, Thursday, June 20, 2047.
At seven that evening—a little over twelve hours from that moment—Haruyuki would have to take on a mission of the highest level of difficulty: escape from the Castle.
His other self, Silver Crow, was currently trapped in the depths of the Castle in the center of the Unlimited Neutral Field, along with Ardor Maiden, who had the power of purification. Unless they managed to make it past the fearsome attacks of the God Suzaku one more time, Haruyuki had no future as a Burst Linker. Because, if he couldn’t purify himself of the Armor of Catastrophe that lurked deep within his avatar, a bounty of the highest order would be placed on his head at the next meeting of the Seven Kings.
Although he had gone on an unexpected adventure the night before a mission where he really needed to have a solid sleep behind him, Haruyuki actually felt unusually full of energy. He had the real sense that the duel with the infected Takumu and the experience in the central server after that had given him a certain something.
Turning their faces back from the clock, the three nodded firmly. With a smile on her face, Chiyuri slapped Haruyuki hard on the back.
“Haru, you go and cut down that stupid bird and hurry home already!”
“Right, Haru! Compared to fighting me in IS mode, it should be a breeze, right?”
“Oh! You said it, Professor Mayuzumi!”
And with the grins the two boys exchanged once more, the impromptu sleepover party came to an end.
The brave warrior Chiyuri, still in her pajamas, was the first to turn toward the front door in a bid to return to her home two floors below, soon followed by Takumu in his sweats. As he stood at the entryway seeing them off, Haruyuki suddenly noticed Takumu make a small gesture.
He raised his right hand and gently held his left arm around his wrist. The very place where the ISS kit had parasitized him.
Haruyuki took a step forward. “Taku,” he said quietly. “I have to apologize. I wrecked your power.”
His friend turned and grinned, but Haruyuki felt a certain faint melancholy behind it. Still, Takumu shook his head from side to side.
“It’s true I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that incredible power,” he said in an untroubled voice. “But I really have to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’d rather be how I am, you know? No matter how much I worry or how lost I am.”
“…Taku…”
“And I got something way bigger than that power. Which is why you totally don’t need to apologize to me.”
“Huh?” Haruyuki blinked several times and then asked, head cocked, “So, like, some kind of amazing special attack?”
Before Takumu could answer, Chiyuri, having put on her shoes, whirled around and shouted, “Aaah! Come on! How can you be so thick!! Taku’s trying to say—” For some reason, she cut herself off there and grinned. “Actually, you think about it. It’s your homework for tomorrow!”
Haruyuki put the living room back the way it had been before the sleepover and scarfed down a breakfast of cereal and milk before changing into his school uniform and leaving for the day.
As he rode down in the elevator, he typed out a short text message to his mother. The gist of it was a report that he had gotten up and gone to school, and he wrote a thank-you for letting Takumu and Chiyuri stay over the night before. Now that he was thinking about it, all the members of his Legion would be coming together at the Arita house that evening, but the meeting would end before his mother came home, so he left that part out. He sent it as the elevator reached the ground floor.
The reply that came a few seconds later simply said “Understood,” but a money code for five hundred yen was attached. Unthinkingly, Haruyuki grinned and happily charged his account with it.
His mother, Saya Arita, was a mysterious woman, even seen through the eyes of her own child. The fact that she was thirty-seven that year meant she had given birth to Haruyuki at twenty-three. She had never told him the details of that timeline herself, but she would have been a student doing her graduate studies at a university within the city at the time. While there, she had married a man three years her senior working in a network-related company and borne a child. But the particulars of this time were unknown, and there had been no wedding, either. And apparently, this was the reason they were estranged from his mother’s family in Yamagata.
When she finished her master’s course while raising a baby—regardless of the fact that she was relying on the Neurolinker for some of that rearing—and received her MBA, she was hired by a Japanese investment bank with its head office in the United States. She had distinguished herself as a member of the trading department and, through her work on several large cases, gotten promoted in recent years to an associate.
Haruyuki had actually heard all this from Chiyuri’s mother, Momoe. She and Haruyuki’s mother had apparently been friends since back then. But Momoe also didn’t tell him about a certain incident—about why Haruyuki’s parents had gotten divorced.
The divorce was finalized seven years earlier. His mother had been thirty, his father thirty-three, and Haruyuki seven. He barely remembered it. But there was one scene burned into one corner of his memory that would never disappear.
One night, hearing voices, little Haruyuki woke up. When he listened closely, he could definitely hear a conversation on the other side of the door. He didn’t fall back to sleep right away because of the sharp edges in those two voices. Instead, he got out of bed and quietly opened the door. At the time, he didn’t sleep in the larger room he had now but rather a smaller room on the other side of the living room. At the end of the dark hallway, hazy light shone through the glass dividing door. Haruyuki moved without making a sound and crouched down next to the door.
Although his parents’ voices as he eavesdropped were forcibly hushed, they were clearly having heated words. They were arguing fiercely about something. He could catch bits and pieces like “take care of,” “promised,” and “used,” but he didn’t understand what they meant. However, young Haruyuki instinctively knew that his parents were fighting about him.
And there his memory ended abruptly, as though slamming into a wall, and Haruyuki absently raised his face.
Before he knew it, he had crossed the large courtyard of his condo and arrived at the edge of Kannana Street. He shook his head lightly and set his thoughts on a new track. He wasn’t particularly fond of remembering the past.
At any rate, this Saya Arita was a woman who moved relentlessly forward as though possessed. Never showing anyone the depths of her heart, without even looking at her feet…
He may have at some point thought it was sad, but it didn’t particularly bother him now. She didn’t hassle him about his grades, she never forgot to give him five hundred yen for lunch, and she let his friends stay over. Complaining about that was an invitation to disaster.
He took a deep breath and then replaced the air built up in his lungs as he glanced at the AR display on his virtual desktop.
The weather forecast for the day was cloudy, with light rain in the afternoon that would stop toward evening. He didn’t see any warning message that he’d forgotten anything, and thanks to the fact that he had left the house much earlier than usual, his scheduled arrival time at school was a full thirty minutes before the first bell. He had a little time to spare for a mission before school started.
Stepping out into the crosswalk of the ring road, Haruyuki shifted his bag onto his back and started out toward the south at a brisk pace.
Where he would normally turn right at the intersection under the Chuo Line, he went straight. He climbed the hill of south Koenji and rode up the escalator to the pedestrian bridge crossing Oume Kaido. At the top, he turned left and then stopped directly above the wide, eight-lane highway. As he looked down on t
he stream of EVs flowing back and forth, he murmured under his breath, “Burst Link.”
Skreeeeee!! Thunder ripped through the air, and the world froze blue. Immediately, he clicked on the flaming B icon at the bottom left of his virtual desktop. From the menu that popped up, he opened the matching list for Suginami Area No. 2 and touched a name in the middle of the list of avatars, which could hardly be said to be lengthy. Without hesitating, he tapped the DUEL button that appeared in a small pop-up window.
The transformation began in the initial accelerated space, and the clear blue world creaked and groaned. The road turned into a dead valley full of debris, the buildings reddish-brown rocky mountains, the sky a dirty pale yellow. A Wasteland stage.
Checking that the guide cursor was pointing south on Kannana, Haruyuki sent his body, in duel avatar form now, over the edge of the pedestrian bridge. He landed with a thud and waited for the roar of the gasoline engine approaching from a distance.
Just the other morning, Haruyuki had challenged the exact same opponent at the exact same time in this very place. So his opponent had no doubt guessed his intention—that he wanted to talk rather than fight. Having made this judgment, he raised a hand at the silhouette that came into view.
“Oh, hi! Good morn…” Haruyuki started to offer a greeting, but his words changed midway into a scream. “…eaaaooooh?!”
He barely managed to throw himself to the right and avoid the iron monster charging at him at top speed—a large American motorcycle from the previous century.
Before Haruyuki’s eyes, the motorcycle spun around, a shower of sparks jetting off from the front and rear disc brakes, and came to a stop, leaving the smell of burning and a groove dug out of the gravel road.
Haruyuki jumped to his feet and turned toward the rider of the vehicle, shouting in a panic. “Uh, um, sorry! I wanted to talk again in closed mode—”
But the rider—member of the Green Legion, Great Wall, level-five Burst Linker Ash Roller—flicked the fingers of his right hand dismissively, interrupting Haruyuki. “Totally compredés that. I know, so mighty me’s starting things off today with a wicked turn!”