Quantum masking of his visual field. Overwriting the visual signal from his Neurolinker. Someone had used a program to paint over the shower room signs with a fake image, making the boys’ into the girls’ and the girls’ into the boys’. As soon as he reached this conclusion, he belatedly realized that the signs he had seen a few minutes earlier had been excessively vivid in the dim hallway. Almost as if they had been emitting light themselves.
How a program like this had gotten into his system was still a mystery, but he was pretty sure he knew who had gotten it in there.
Seiji Nomi.
It was all a trap set by Nomi. He knew that Haruyuki was spying on the kendo team. And so he led him to the showers, made him get the signs wrong, and sent him to the girls’ side, thereby ensnaring him in this precarious situation. To get him expelled, and thereby wipe every trace of Haruyuki, the Burst Linker Silver Crow, from Umesato Junior High School.
A strategy so brilliant, cold, and merciless, it was terrifying. On the same level as the time Kuroyukihime had a student by the name of Araya removed—maybe even more so.
“Huh? Chi? You’re still in there?” The voice of one of the girls came abruptly from the other side of the swing door.
Cringing with fear, Haruyuki heard Chiyuri reply right next to his ear. “Yeah. I managed to sweat a ton!”
“You must have. I know it’s right before the regional prelims, but, man, you were pushing too hard.”
Haruyuki was drenched in sweat. Steamed as he was in the extremely hot water vapor—wearing a jacket over a blazer over a button-up shirt over a T-shirt—he didn’t feel the heat at all. Quite the opposite; his skin was so chilled his teeth were almost chattering.
If that girl outside decided right now to play a joke on Chiyuri and open the partition, Haruyuki wouldn’t be the only one with his neck on the chopping block; Chiyuri would also be in serious trouble. She wouldn’t be able to play the victim of his peeping; she’d probably be punished just as harshly as he.
“But Chi? Isn’t the water too hot? It’s crazy steamy.”
“Huh? It feels better hot. Gets the blood moving, too.”
“Ugh, you sound like my grandma!”
The other students laughed loudly. Chiyuri laughed along with them, and Haruyuki could feel her muscles shaking lightly through his back glued to her body.
Sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me. I was an idiot. If I hadn’t been looking for the Neurolinker in that bag, none of this would be happening! he cried out in his heart, clenching his teeth so hard they threatened to break.
Then he heard the creak of a door swinging open, and his feet left the ground.
But it was the sound of a girl going into the neighboring stall. He heard two more doors opening and closing, and then the sound of showers all starting at nearly the same time. Several seconds later, he felt Chiyuri peel away from him and step outside.
When she came back after a moment, Haruyuki looked over his shoulder at her, and she said, only her lips moving, Now! Get out!
Unable to voice his gratitude at Chiyuri’s quick thinking because he was still holding his breath, Haruyuki simply nodded and staggered out of the stall. He forced himself to focus on nothing but the exit and worked hard to make his stiff body move: one, then two steps in a half-crouched posture. If he fell or something now— Or if another girl were to come in…
Just thinking about it was enough to make him pass out, but, somehow, he miraculously succeeded in escaping from the shower room without tripping on his own feet. He half jogged along the curved C-shape of the passage, reached his starting point of the boy/girl bifurcation, and leaned back against the wall, rubbery with exhaustion. The last of his strength drained from his legs, and he nearly slumped to the ground. But it was indignation, abruptly erupting within him, that kept him on his feet.
“Bastard!” he shouted in his mouth and raised his head abruptly, before charging into the real boys’ shower room on the opposite end of the hallway.
But the pale blue-gray-painted space was absolutely deserted. There wasn’t even any trace of the shower stalls having been used. Most likely, while Haruyuki was busting into the girls’ side, Nomi had gotten pretty far pretty quickly.
“Dammit!” Haruyuki shouted and slammed his fist into the wall behind him.
Two hours later, at his own condo building’s twenty-first floor. The Kurashimas, Chiyuri’s bedroom.
“Excuse me, sorry, my bad, I really am sorry!!” Haruyuki repeated his apology chant again for the millionth time and pressed his forehead against the laminate floor with each word.
The owner of the room sat on the edge of the bed, still in her school uniform, arms crossed, emitting a fiercely murderous aura. The fact that she had said almost nothing since she invited the contrite Haruyuki in made her even more frightening.
He understood only too well that the mess he had made was essentially an act of barbarism of such magnitude that it would be stricken from the realm of possibly funny things for the rest of time—or he thought he understood that. But Haruyuki, being a boy, wasn’t equipped to truly relate to the enormity of the shock Chiyuri had suffered.
He had witnessed her naked as the day she was born from extremely close up: a mere one meter away. It went without saying that this was a greater crime than Takumu infecting Chiyuri’s Neurolinker with that virus last year. It was different from when they were kids and got in the bath together. Everything about it was different. Her collarbone clearly defined now, pectoral muscles connecting shoulders to chest, and the unexpectedly voluminous, very real, white—
“You’re remembering it, aren’t you?” she said abruptly in a low voice, and Haruyuki jumped at least a centimeter, still prostrate before her.
“I-I’m not! I wasn’t!”
“Liar. Your ears are bright red. Let me tell you one thing right now. If you use that for anything weird, I will make you dive into that—what’s it called, that U-Unlimited Neutral Field until you lose your memory. For like a hundred years.”
He jumped up again with a small squeal. “I-I won’t! I won’t use it!”
It was true that he would end up spending more than forty days inside if she did make him use the Unlimited Burst command right then and there and keep watch over him for an hour. There was no doubt that the images stored in his brain would degrade in line with that lived time. But if another Burst Linker or an Enemy were to pursue him during that time, forget about his memory, he would end up dying of overwork instead.
“I-I’ll forget it! I’ll totally forget it!” Haruyuki shook his head and his extra chins desperately.
“Well, for real, I’m still going to think about what kind of penance you need to do for me, Haru. I’ll hold off on it for now, though.”
Something thumped into Haruyuki’s head with an indignant sniff. Glancing up, he saw that it was a large stuffed animal cushion.
“So you can quit with the bowing and scraping. Sit up already.”
“O-okay.” Nodding, he picked up the cushion. He had thought it was an elephant, but the nose was too short, and it had six legs, three on each side. “Wh-what is this?”
“Water bear. Strongest creature on earth…Anyway! You said the reason you snuck into the girls’ shower room was because of this virus, and the one who infected you with the virus was this Nomi kid. Really?”
“I’m totally positive.” Haruyuki hurried to sit in a proper kneeling position on the strange creature and jerked his head up and down. “I know I went in the side with the boys’ shower sign. I might be a total scatterbrained alien, but I’m not going to get pink and blue signs mixed up.”
“But when would he have done that? I mean, you haven’t even talked to Nomi, right?”
“Y-yeah.” He nodded sharply.
The truth was, how he had been infected with the virus was a total mystery. At some time during the week between the entrance ceremony and that day, someone else had apparently handled his Neurolinker, but Haruyuki couldn’t believe he had left a
n opening like that.
If he could isolate the virus, he would be able to determine the date and time it had been uploaded, but no matter how many times he poked around in his physical memory, he couldn’t find anything that looked suspicious. When he checked his Neurolinker’s operation log, he found traces of a single unknown file being automatically deleted immediately after he went into the girls’ shower room. Since he had no recollection of performing this operation, the virus had most likely been set to launch and then self-destruct immediately after fulfilling its objective—i.e., applying a mask to Haruyuki’s vision.
“But…” Chiyuri brought her thick eyebrows together tightly and cocked her head. “If he can do something like that, why didn’t he just mess up the OS on your Neurolinker or delete the Brain Burst program or something? If he wanted to make it so you can’t duel, wouldn’t that work better?”
“No matter what kind of crazy virus you use, you won’t be able to destroy system files with it. The best you can do is use its functionality to play tricks. And if you’re already a Burst Linker, you can redownload the Brain Burst program itself anytime. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to change Linkers or anything, would you? Of course, you have to put your core card in the new Linker, but…”
Having made these rebuttals, Haruyuki scowled suddenly. “But wait…if he’s doing such serious and seriously hard stuff like overriding my vision, that’s not at the prank level anymore. He’s crossed over into really rough territory. I mean, taken to the extreme, he could basically kill me, couldn’t he? If he made me mistake a red light for a green one or if he completely masked a moving car from all my senses?”
“K-kill—” Chiyuri cried out unconsciously, before remembering that her mother was probably in the living room and clapping a hand over her mouth before speaking once more. “Kill you? What are you even saying?! W-we’re talking about a game here!”
All Haruyuki could do was smile weakly and shake his head from side to side. “Brain Burst both is and isn’t a game. A guy like Nomi, who’s using acceleration for status in the real world, will do anything to protect that power. Think about it. If it hadn’t been you who’d come out of that shower stall then, but some other girl, right about now I’d be—”
“At the police,” Chiyuri murmured, and a belated tremor ran up his back. “But…So then, does this mean that that Nomi kid is going to set up traps like this from now on? Not just targeting you, Haru, but…Taku, Kuroyukihime, me…?”
“No. I won’t let him,” Haruyuki declared, uncharacteristically firm, trying to reassure Chiyuri. “Now that we know how he works, we just have to wait and watch. Maybe Taku and I will take him on tomorrow. I don’t want to, but…if we have to, we’ll force him to direct, and we’ll get to the bottom of why he doesn’t show up on the matching list.”
“Haru.” Chiyuri looked even more anxious, biting her lip and turning her face downward. “I…I dunno, I don’t like it. I feel like there’s a mistake somewhere. I mean, it’s a game…But you, and Taku, and Nomi, you don’t seem to be having any fun at all.”
He quickly shook his head, but at the same time, he wasn’t surprised in the least that she would feel that way. Because Chiyuri was in possession of a rare healer avatar, she still had not experienced a normal duel even once. Right away, he wanted more than anything to show her the size and details of the field, the excitement of battle, and the exhilaration of victory, but for that, he would have to wait a week for Kuroyukihime’s return to Tokyo.
“I-I’ve changed since I came across Brain Burst, at the very least. I went up against Taku for real, and I feel like my groveling parameters have gone down a little…p-probably,” he stammered.
Chiyuri blinked hard, and a meaningful smile rose up on her face. “Well, I guess that’s true. If the old Haru had seen me naked, he would’ve spent a whole month running away from me without even trying to apologize.”
Gulp.
His throat closed up, and the screen in his mind generated a problematic image once again. “Excuse me, sorry, my bad, I really am sorry!!” Haruyuki prostrated himself once more, this time to hide the band of heat coloring his face.
“Enough already!” Another cushion came flying at him, hitting him squarely in the head.
“And one more thing,” Chiyuri proclaimed quietly, her voice taking on that dangerous edge again. “If you tell Taku about the shower room thing, I really will kill you. And I’ll tell Kuroyuki, too.”
“What?” Haruyuki froze like a block of ice.
Although it was true that he had not the slightest intention of telling Kuroyukihime, he had thought to report to Takumu once his apology was finished. “N-not even Taku?”
“Obviously not! What are you even thinking?!”
Taking a third cushion to the crown of his head, Haruyuki wondered how it was so obvious. But if he couldn’t tell Taku, then how was he supposed to explain Nomi’s attack? Maybe he could just say that he was mistakenly led into the girls’ shower room and not say anything about bumping into Chiyuri there. He was slightly ashamed at the idea of creating secrets to keep from his good friend and partner, but he took a deep breath and shook it off.
This wasn’t the time to be dragging out a shower room incident.
This had been Nomi’s declaration of war. For the battle about to begin, Haruyuki needed to muster every bit of willpower he had in him. And then, if possible, take care of the problem before Kuroyukihime came back from Okinawa. He couldn’t be exposing that level-nine fighter to danger.
Haruyuki chanted this to himself as he left the Kurashimas’ and returned to his own condo, two floors up.
He was wrong, however. He had misread the situation so badly that there would be no coming back from it.
The battle had already started and ended before he even realized it.
7
“That’s game over, Arita—no, Silver Crow.”
These were the first words spoken by Seiji Nomi at their initial meeting.
If you set north as up, Umesato Junior High School was shaped like an H on its side, with the main gate to the east. Of the two vacant spaces wedged in between the crossbar Sports Wing—which connected the northern Special Classroom and the southern General Classroom wings—the eastern section was called the “front garden” while the western section was the “courtyard.”
In this courtyard, rows of incredibly ancient camphor and oak trees stretched along all sides, making the garden dim even during the day. It had no benches or lawns, so the majority of students never went near it, and there were no social cameras.
Immediately after first period on Monday, Haruyuki received a text mail from Nomi, inviting him to meet in this courtyard. At the end of the short text, in a tiny font, he saw the word alone, and he immediately glanced over Takumu’s back, seated ahead of him in a row to the right.
Haruyuki hadn’t, in the end, been able to tell Takumu about the shower room incident the previous day. He was good up to the part about being infected with the virus and charging into the girls’ side, but he would have to touch on the fact that he had run into Chiyuri if he was to explain how he managed to make it out alive. However, Chiyuri herself had forbidden him to speak of it, so to keep that bit secret, he would have to lie, no matter how he told the story.
He absolutely did not want to lie to Takumu. But he could also easily understand that Chiyuri didn’t want to be embarrassed by it any more than she already was. And now, as he moaned and groaned, torn between his loyalties to both of his friends, he was called out by the instigator of the whole situation himself. Bowing to the inevitable, Haruyuki decided he would report to Takumu after the face-to-face. And the mail insisted he come alone.…If he went with Taku, Nomi wouldn’t show.
When the designated time arrived—the twenty-minute break between second and third periods—Haruyuki got up from his seat and flew out into the hallway. He ran down the stairs, grabbed his sneakers from the shoe lockers, headed down the gravel path alongside the gym, and s
tepped into the courtyard.
It wasn’t a particularly happy place for him. It was outside the range of the social cameras, and those bullies had made him come here far too many times. His memories of this place were all miserable—being shoved around, falling on his ass on top of wet, fallen leaves.
But that’s all in the past. The me now is different from the me then, he murmured to himself as he walked over to the remarkably thick Mongolian oak in the middle of the gloomy copse. He heard the crunch of footfalls, and a person appeared from the other side of the oak, facing him.
Convinced as he was that he would be the first to arrive, Haruyuki was momentarily taken aback at this, and he took a half step in retreat. Now that they were face-to-face, he could see that Seiji Nomi was indeed fairly small in stature. Even compared with Haruyuki, who was slightly below average in his class, Nomi was yet another ten centimeters shorter. His limbs, his torso, and his neck—equipped with a dark gray Neurolinker—were all slim like those of a child. He probably weighed half of what Haruyuki did; his face, too, was cherubic enough to be mistaken for that of a girl. So much so that, despite having memorized the face from the photo Takumu sent, Haruyuki wondered for a moment if this could really be the person who had set such a ruthless trap for him.
Nomi bowed lightly, soft, bowl-cut hair swinging. The smile that started on his small, neatly shaped lips spread to big, beautiful eyes fringed with long eyelashes.
“That’s game over, Arita—no, Silver Crow.”
So said Seiji Nomi.
“Huh? Wh-what is?” Attacked and caught off guard, Haruyuki could only stammer a question in response.
“The match. My victory,” Nomi said, smile still dancing across his face, and he shrugged his slender shoulders.
“What are you— Victory…” Haruyuki took a deep breath, got his thoughts in order, and scowled at his opponent. “We haven’t had a duel yet. Because you’ve got something set up so you don’t show up on the matching list.”