And the question about why he hadn’t been sent flying by the wind was also cryptic. Obviously, it was because he had held on tight. And Silver Crow’s body had very low air resistance. So if he plastered himself against the wall, the wind just slid over his back—
“Oh!” Haruyuki cried softly, abruptly. He felt like he was getting close to something important. Chewing on the remainder of the bread unconsciously, he continued to ponder the matter further.
Incarnate was a means of manipulating your avatar or objects, using Image Power.
When he had pressed himself up against the rock wall yesterday and endured the wind, Haruyuki had, basically, not even thought about the possibility of being sent flying. With Silver Crow’s slim, smooth body, he had believed he could get through any gust of wind, and that then became fact.
What if that—if the power of the Incarnate System was already at work, then? Had he decreased the pressure he actually received from the air by drawing out a solid image of himself getting through the wind? And if he had, could he do the same thing with this steel wall as his opponent?
Stuffing the last bit of bread into his mouth, he slid his helmet back down with a whoosh and stared intently at his right hand. The five fingers there could not be any slimmer or sharper. And the silver armor shone, quite hard-looking.
Not a punch—a spear hand strike.
The thought hit him spontaneously, and he lined his fingers up tightly against one another, stretched out straight. Fixing his wrist, his arm from the elbow down looked almost like a sword. He dropped his hips, extended one leg behind him, and this time glared at the wall in front of him.
The steel plates glittering blue-black did look formidable, but it was, after all, the stage background. It simply existed, without any meaning whatsoever. Put another way, the thing itself was nothing more than an enumeration of the code in the Brain Burst server somewhere.
If he couldn’t dig a hole in a thing like that, how could he call himself a duelist? Without a doubt, if it were she, if it were the Black King, Black Lotus, without batting an eyelash, she would shred this wall like it was butter.
He positioned his arm, fingers aligned, at his hip. He took a deep breath and then another—
“Hah!!” He thrust straight ahead with a martial arts–style cry.
Pale sparks shot in all directions, accompanied by a sharp squeal. A pain so intense it made him dizzy ran up the joints of each finger, his wrist, and then his elbow. The HP gauge in the top left of his view was shaved down the tiniest bit.
Moaning involuntarily, Haruyuki dropped heavily to his knees, but when he looked up, it was definitely there. A sharp scar about a centimeter long and a millimeter deep, etched out of the smooth wall.
I can do it! he thought, immediately followed by him lamenting, It’s not enough!
His image power wasn’t strong enough yet. He got hurt because he was thinking of his fingers as fingers, his arm as an arm. Think sword. A sword that could pierce and mince anything, like hers.
He stood and snapped his fingers out again. After thinking for a minute, he bent his thumb toward the palm of his hand. Thus, his arm, from elbow to middle finger’s tip, made a sharp line, almost as if it had been designed that way right from the start.
This time, rather than positioning it at his hip, he brought it a little higher, readying it near his shoulder, drawn back as far as he could. Then, he thrust his left hand far out in front, twisting it ninety degrees as he did so. He had seen Black Lotus move like that for her special attack, “Death by Piercing.”
“Hiyaah!”
The crash of impact this time was a little higher and clearer than the last time. And although he was made to dance again with a pain like lightning and forced to grit his teeth, the scar gouged out of the wall was a tiny bit deeper.
That day eventually ended with him simply continuing to attack the wall.
He gradually stopped feeling the pain, and although he was able to dig his fingertips in about three millimeters when the sun was near setting, he was still nowhere near the level of being able to use that as a support to climb the wall. However, rather than trying to push himself, Haruyuki returned to the same roost as the day before, even feeling a kind of satisfaction in his profound exhaustion.
Was there a chance that his work was just ordinary escapism?
He couldn’t avoid the thought as he laid down. Because it was a fact that by accelerating, he was stretching out time and putting off the problem of Chiyuri, Takumu, and Nomi. But right now, he was happy at being able to concentrate so intently and throw himself into something like this; the work was a blessing to him. Haruyuki closed his eyes and once again slept like the dead.
The morning of the fourth day.
He stood in the same place as the previous day and revised his thinking as he stared at the many scars cut into the wall of blue-lit steel.
The directionality of his Imaging thought process should be correct: imagine hardness and sharpness in his fingers and the power in his arms hammering out those holes. But he felt like one thing wasn’t quite right somehow.
As he was hemming and hawing, a fabric package made a direct hit to his head once again. He quickly grabbed it from the ground and yelled thanks up at the sky before biting into the bread inside.
Again today, a single note was attached. Heart pounding, he opened it.
“Good luck, Corvus! ♥” was all it said, and Haruyuki snorted lightly, flustered by the symbol at the end of the sentence. He had been expecting a hint like yesterday, but nothing else was written there.
So then I guess this means I already know all the things I need to know, he thought, making short work of the bread before starting to desperately rack his brains once more.
Will. Desire straight from the heart. Image Power. Sky Raker’s words came back to life in his ears. Do you see? Image Power! It is precisely this that is the true power hidden within us Burst Linkers.
Hold…on. Her speech sounded really familiar, something from a long time ago, way back, something She had said as well. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Her voice played vividly from the depths of his memory.
Listen, Haruyuki. You’re fast. You can become faster than anyone else. Faster even than me, faster than the other kings. And speed is a Burst Linker’s greatest strength.
There was no way he could forget that. Those were the words she said to him right before she used the final command of Physical Full Burst to save him. Kuroyukihime had to have known about the Incarnate System hidden within Burst Linkers at that time. However, she had expressed the greatest power not as “image power” but as “speed.” Which meant—
The two were the same thing.
The word speed that Kuroyukihime had used wasn’t simply referring to the pace of a duel avatar’s movement in the field. The signal speed output by the brain and the consciousness connected to the Neurolinker. The quickness of the response between this world and yourself. And that, namely, was being closer to the true nature of the world.
“Manipulation…through images…,” Haruyuki murmured and readied his right hand.
It wasn’t about power. It was about speed. What he should be imagining was that. Moving as fast as he possibly could. Getting as close to the world as he possibly could. Becoming one with it.
“…Foo!” With the faintest of cries, Haruyuki put the image of light on his right hand and sent it flying.
Although faint, a white light did trace out its trajectory through space. Schwing! The sound echoed beautifully, almost like something from a musical instrument.
Haruyuki looked at his own fingers, buried more than five millimeters in the steel wall, and clenched his left fist tightly.
For another three days, Haruyuki continued the same training in the same spot.
He rose with the sun and greedily devoured the bun tossed down from the peak. The heart symbol was sometimes there, sometimes not, on the accompanying note, but with the piece of paper’s encouraging w
ords as support, he turned to face the wall and focused on delivering spear-hand strikes over and over with both hands.
In the fourteen or so years of Haruyuki’s life, he had never once concentrated on a single thing for so long a time. Or perhaps it would be better to say that this was a time that, right from the start, could not exist in the real world. A flesh-and-blood body frequently got hungry, quickly got tired, and he did have to go to school, after all. It was precisely because of the Unlimited Neutral Field, where the flow of time was accelerated a thousand times, and his duel avatar, which did not know exhaustion, that this intense focus was possible.
It didn’t at all seem like the light emitted by his fingertips, the depth they dug into the wall, and all the things he could experience around him were increasing. But Haruyuki harbored no doubts about his straightforward training. And so, aware of nothing but the speed of the signal emitted by his brain and delivered to his avatar, he repeated the same action thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times.
He felt like this training might be something that would one day suddenly awaken his “true power.” He understood he was setting his sights on something that could only be reached through the steady accumulation of something that was invisible to him. It was the same as with the virtual squash game where he had tried endlessly for the high score in the Umesato Junior High’s local net. Concentration and accumulation. There was no short cut.
Sky Raker, waiting at the peak of this iron tower—along with the Red King Nico and the Black King Kuroyukihime, who stood at the peak of the accelerated world itself—also probably had gone down this road in the past. Although he was so far behind them on this long, long road, he couldn’t even see their shadows.
Someday, I’ll be there, too…I will definitely reach that place someday. Such did Haruyuki pray intently from his heart at sunset on the sixth day as he gazed at his right hand, which was finally able to dig into the thick steel up to the base of his fingers.
It took another half day until he was able to do the same thing while attached to the wall—near noon on the day that marked a week since he’d come to this world.
After staring attentively at the sun, which shone weakly on the other side of thick black clouds, and deliberating for a while, Haruyuki decided to at last start his second ascent. There were only another five or six hours until sunset, but he wouldn’t need to look for rocks jutting out, pause in his route, or double back on himself like in the Wasteland stage. If he climbed straight up, he could make it to the top before nightfall.
“All right!” Haruyuki slammed his hands against the sides of his helmet, let out a battle cry, and inflicted the first strike on the wall.
With a clear ringing, the white light traced out its trajectory, and his swordlike hand pierced deep into the wall. Hand reliably jammed in as a support, he yanked his body up and then struck in a slightly higher place with his left hand.
Speed. The speed of light. That’s all you think about.
At some point, Haruyuki even stopped repeating the word speed to himself. All that existed in his brain was the image of a sword tip, of a white light being thrust forward.
Pierce. Lift body. Concentrate. Pierce again.
Since he needed to plunge his fingers in as level as he possibly could, the distance he gained with one cycle was just barely thirty centimeters. When he thought about the fact that he was trying to climb 333 meters, a simple calculation told him he would have to pierce the wall 1,010 times.
But Haruyuki absorbedly, intently repeated the same action. Without looking at the peak or the ground, he forgot the past and the future; the wall in front of him and his own fingertips became his entire world.
Pierce. Pierce. Again. Again.
Already, his striking hand was emitting a dazzling, laser-like light. The depth to which his sword hand dug rapidly increased, to the point where it was work to pull it out again, but he was unaware of that as well and simply continued to pierce and climb.
Haruyuki sank into a deep, abnormal concentration, even greater than when he was tackling the bullet-evasion game he had created. The information from his sight and hearing lost its meaning, and the steel wall eventually disappeared as well. In the seemingly endless darkness, there were only the flashes emitted by his hands, alternating flickers—
No.
He could see something.
Far, far in the distance in the darkness was a blue rippling like the surface of water.
The portal? Someone was on the other side of it. Vision filled with a golden radiance, all he could see was the silhouette, but he was sure…someone was…
Haruyuki broke through the dense darkness with both hands and tried to go to the silhouette. He felt like it was calling him.
“Who…are you…?” His voice rang out in the gloom and echoed loudly, and to this, some kind of response, no, something like a signal—
Then a faint trembling raced along his body, and Haruyuki opened his eyes wide with a gasp.
Before his eyes was the blue-black steel wall, unchanged. The sky was already dyed a deep red. Sunset was near.
But a light that was not the sun reached him from the east, and Haruyuki stared at it. A seven-colored aurora surging from the sky. The sound of bells. It was the Change.
Except that this time, Haruyuki couldn’t hurry.
He continued to move both hands at the same fixed pace as he had been. Even without looking up, he could feel the edge of the peak close above him. As if aiming to make Haruyuki fall, the aurora advanced aggressively. The snapping and roaring of the land being rebuilt filled the world.
Pierce. Lift body. Pierce. Lift body.
Simultaneous with his next strike, his vision was assaulted by the seven-colored beam, and Silver Crow’s slender body was instantly sent flying into the sky, flicked by the finger of an unseen giant.
The summit of the tower, so tantalizingly within reach, grew distant as the virtual gravity reached out its hand for Haruyuki, practically salivating.
But.
“…Hng!” With a low cry from the sky, Haruyuki set his sights on the wall two meters above him and launched his final blow.
Schwaaan! The simple sound reverberated through the air, and a sword of pure white light reached out and pierced deep—deep into a wall it should not have been able to reach.
At the same time as he felt sure resistance, Haruyuki used his arm as a fulcrum to vault himself upward with all his might. Whirling around and around, he flew through the aurora, and where he landed with a crunch was—
The lawn of the garden in the sky, which he hadn’t set foot on in a week.
“Welcome back, Corvus.”
Still crouching on one knee, Haruyuki heard the gentle voice from above. An intense despair washed over him at that, but he fought back against it and earnestly raised his head.
The sky-blue avatar in the silver wheelchair was looking down on him with a smile. “You came back very quickly, just as I had expected. No wonder you are the ‘child’ she selected.”
Haruyuki responded from a totally different place. “I shouldn’t have made it.” Because in his head, only the sensation of his final strike burned too brightly. “With my short arms, that was a distance that I completely could not reach…But I believed—No, I knew that I would. That…If that’s the power of the will, then…”
Here, he finally focused both eyes on Sky Raker and continued. “That’s not ‘playing’ in any sense of the word. It’s something…deeper…connected to this world. It’s a…It’s…” Haruyuki fumbled fervently through the limited number of endings for that sentence and managed to somehow put into words what he wanted to say. “It’s like a rewriting of the facts…”
“Yes. That’s exactly it.”
Sky Raker’s smile disappeared as she clasped her hands together tightly. When she continued, her voice was weightier. “Overwrite. This one word is precisely the key to the Incarnate System. However, you can’t comprehen
d if you simply hear the word. You have to experience it.”
“Over…write,” Haruyuki repeated hoarsely and Sky Raker assented softly.
“The Incarnate System—in other words, the control system built into the Brain Burst program—is essentially assistive at best. It’s nothing more than a system to support movement control and supplement the avatar’s motion. But images released too quickly and too strongly by the consciousness can surpass even the constraints of the program and become manifest. Wheels that shouldn’t turn turn, an arm that shouldn’t reach reaches. A resolute intention, a will overwrites events.”
Haruyuki had supposedly reached the first level in the Incarnate System, but these words invoked a sense of wonder in him.
It had already been six months since he started playing Brain Burst. It was supposed to be nothing more than a game. But of all the countless titles he had played up to that point, he wondered if there was even one that questioned the strength of image power—that is, of the will.
The wheelchair advanced with a creak and stopped directly in front of Haruyuki, who was still squatting there, struck by these feelings. He timidly accepted the proffered hand and was pulled up with an unexpected strength; somehow, he managed to stand, albeit with a wobble.
Sky Raker took her hand back and smiled once more before uttering even more unexpected words.
“And now I have nothing else to teach you.”
“Huh?” Haruyuki gasped and shook his head side to side several times. “B-but I’m still…I mean, I just finally climbed the wall! That’s a long way from flying. I still have so many things to learn—”
“I told you, Corvus,” the sky-blue avatar said calmly, shaking her head slowly, “that I never reached the sky in the end. Perhaps you are the one who will be able to fly one day with Incarnate alone. But that will probably take a very long time. Even if you focus hard on forging yourself in this world…Yes, probably ten years.”
“Te—” Haruyuki was at a loss for words and clenched his teeth together tightly before saying, “I-I don’t care. If it means I’ll be able to fly again, I’ll—”