This really is nuts. Haruyuki was impressed anew. Normally, canceling a transaction of money or items in a net game, it went without saying, was something solely at the discretion of the game master. And because of this overwhelming authority, the GM was occasionally likened to a god. However, since there was no so-called GM in Brain Burst, you could say that Chiyuri was, in the Accelerated World, the only one other than the mysterious developer who had the power of a god—even if just a part of that power…
A third flash sent these thoughts rolling around in Haruyuki’s head flying.
“…!!” The three witnesses held their breath and opened their eyes wider.
In the writhing green light, they could definitely see tiny particles of light blue radiance settling on Sky Raker’s thighs. As the number of these particles increased before their eyes, they extended downward. They clumped together into tapered cylinders, grew denser, and began to draw out the hazy shape of legs—
Fwsh!
They vanished like particles of ice melting in the sun.
Instantly, the green light faded as the sound of the bell grew distant and disappeared.
In the center of the now-silent field, Lime Bell staggered as though she had used up all of her energy. Black Lotus was immediately at her side to catch her.
The yellow-green avatar hung there, no strength left in her legs. “…Why…why,” she muttered hoarsely. “How come…they’re not coming back…?”
“It’s not your fault, Bell.” The answer came from Sky Raker, gently rearranging the hem of her dress. She moved her head slightly with a comforting smile. “This result proves that in the termination of my legs, a logic of higher priority than the normal game system is at work. The image control system…in other words, the Incarnate System.”
Haruyuki took a sharp breath. In a larger gesture, Black Lotus, still holding Lime Bell, pulled her right foot back. She turned her V-shaped mask away.
Sky Raker began to speak calmly at Chiyuri, who was rooted to the spot, and, by extension, Kuroyukihime.
“But you’ve only heard the broadest outline of the Incarnate System, Bell, so perhaps this is hard for you to understand…Three years ago, I tried to increase the maximum altitude I could fly with the power of my will. In exchange for the sacrifice of my legs, it let me reach the sky; that was the deal I made with god—no, the devil. My wish was heard, or rather the tiniest bit of it was. My maximum altitude reached a mere hundred meters higher…and my legs have never come back, no matter how many times I dive into the field. Keeping my legs away is my own will. I no longer know how to undo this. Which is why it’s not your fault you couldn’t bring them back…and it’s not your fault, either, Lotus.”
When you chase after that power, you absolutely lose something as payment.
The Red Legion’s Blood Leopard had told him this. Maybe Leopard, too, had had an image of Sky Raker in the back of her mind at the time.
To those words, Haruyuki had this response: I want to believe. I want to believe in the Incarnate System, in Brain Burst itself.
He couldn’t make a lie of that. Absolutely not. And to that end as well, Haruyuki had to take Sky Raker to the pinnacle of Hermes’ Cord.
“Raker,” Haruyuki called to her, quietly but in a voice that pulled together every ounce of determination he had. He stared directly into her deep-red eye lenses and moved his mouth. “I don’t think that the fighting ability of our avatars is what decides the strength of our team, of our companions. Like observation and judgment—no, before that, I think the feeling of being able to fight even harder because we’re together is more important than anything. You give us support, Raker. Just having you with us, we are so, so much stronger. So…So.”
With his limited linguistic competence, Haruyuki could only manage to get this much out. Still, trying to communicate what was in his heart, he clenched his hands tightly, and abruptly, Cyan Pile’s large hand slapped him on the shoulder from behind.
“It’s just like Haru says. Raker, you’re a priceless part of the battle potential of this Legion.”
“That’s right, sis!” Chiyuri bobbed her head up and down. “We’re strongest when the five of us are together!”
And then finally, Kuroyukihime took a step forward. “Exactly, Raker. It’s as everyone is saying.” The leader of Nega Nebulus spoke in a tone that was calm, though the pain hidden at the core of it was palpable.
“I told you this before as well. I need you. At any and all times…Let’s make this simple. If you are not in tomorrow’s race, the four of us won’t be able to fight with everything we have. Just this alone is reason enough for you to take part in the event.” She sounded fairly overbearing, but it was that overbearing tone that gave her words the power to get right to the heart of the matter.
Sky Raker’s eyes flew open, and then a faint wry smile crossed her lips. She shook her white hat as if to say, Honestly.
“Lotus, that way of speaking you have hasn’t changed at all since the first time I met you.” She hung her head and lightly stroked her knees with her hands. “There are some things you lose and never get back. But I know that there are also things that keep shining, without ever being damaged…Perhaps the right at least to believe that—or rather, to wish for it to be true—still remains for me…”
Her quiet murmuring, making almost no noise, flowed softly from below her hat. At the same time, Haruyuki felt as though he saw the glint of a single drop falling into space. However, when she lifted her face, the same gentle smile as always was playing around Sky Raker’s mouth.
“Thank you, Lotus, Pile, Bell…Crow. I suppose I can allow myself to be swayed by your kind words. But…” Her expression became playful. “You’ll need to get rid of any sugary ideas of aiming for second or third because I’m taking part. We either have total victory or we burn up in the sky.”
Eep!
Haruyuki jumped up to stand a little straighter, and Takumu and Chiyuri raised their voices in easy laughter.
You guys don’t know! The truth is she’s really, really scary!
Shouting this in his heart, Haruyuki finally was able to put a sincere—albeit slightly stiff—smile on his own face.
6
After bursting out to the real world from the Territory battlefield, Haruyuki hesitated to open his eyes for a while, feeling the pull of gravity on his entire body. He sat like this for nearly ten seconds, but finally, slowly, he lifted his face.
The living room at six o’clock in the evening had fallen back into a silence so deep that he could almost believe that the conversation and laughter exchanged only moments before on the other side had been a hallucination.
The lights were low, so it was fairly dim. The evening sky he could see through the narrow gap in the curtains had sunk into a dull, leaden color. The only movement in his field of view was the apathetic march of the thin second hand of the analog clock hung on the wall, essentially serving nothing more than a decorative purpose.
Sighing lightly from his position on the sofa, Haruyuki flopped over onto his side.
They did try insofar as it was possible to meet in the real before diving for the Territories each Saturday. But when they didn’t have that luxury, they joined in the battles from their various locations, such as individually in their houses or from other parts of town. Although a single fight in Brain Burst was over in a mere 1.8 seconds in the real, defense of a Territory took a succession of ten battles at minimum, so it took up nearly ten minutes, breaks in between fights and the like included. Today, Kuroyukihime hadn’t really been able to get away from the student council office, and so she ended up diving separately. And, of course, given that her house was very near the border with Shibuya Ward, Sky Raker took part from a distance nearly every week.
Haruyuki couldn’t seem to come to terms with fighting in the Territories by himself from his house. The reason was simple: He would make it through ten or more successive and heated battles as if in a dream, and then share the thrill of victor
y or the bitterness of defeat with his companions, only to burst out and wake up suddenly alone in an empty house; it made him feel a pitiless loneliness.
Until he met Kuroyukihime in the fall of last year and received the Brain Burst program, he had never felt lonely being alone. On the contrary, he had felt more comfortable that way. Every day, almost before classes were over, he was flying out the school gates as if to escape when heading home, where he would hole up in his room and throw himself into the world of games and anime and comics. Having a conversation with someone in the real world—just being in the same place as someone else was agony. Even if that someone else was Chiyuri or Takumu.
A mere eight months.
That’s still all the time that had gone by since he became a Burst Linker. And yet now, Haruyuki felt from the bottom of his heart that he wanted to see his friends from the Legion he had only just said good-bye to. And it didn’t matter if it was Niko or Pard or Ash Roller or even Frost Horn. He wanted to exchange blows in a duel, to clamor with criticism over a battle as a member of the Gallery, to meet someone in the real and talk about nothing.
“What happened to me?” he muttered, burying his face in a cushion.
At that moment, a window of some kind started to open in the center of his vision, together with the default sound effect of his home net, and he slapped the confirm button, without bothering to look at what the window said. After all, it was probably just the usual message from his mother about how she was going to be late that night. He promptly forgot about it as words in this vein continued to pop up in his mind.
Have I gotten stronger? Or weaker?
He supposed you could say that the fact that his fear of other people had decreased meant he was stronger. But at the same time, his dependence on other people had also increased.
Back when he was alone every day, he had nothing to lose. But now, Haruyuki was deeply terrified of destroying the modest personal relationships he had managed to develop over the last eight months. In particular, the lone thread of black silk tied tightest in the depths of his heart that stretched straight up, glittering all the while—
Even though he knew this line of thinking was dangerous, he couldn’t stop. Lying facedown on the sofa in the dim living room, he squeezed his eyes shut and kept thinking, bringing his arms up around his head.
Naturally, the end of that thread was connected to the person who had saved him, his “parent,” Kuroyukihime.
She was currently in ninth grade at Umesato Junior High. And the first term of that school year was already half over. Which meant there were just ten months left. Once a mere three hundred days passed, Kuroyukihime would graduate from Umesato. He hadn’t asked her anything about where she would go to high school. He was afraid to ask.
Real-world time, passing bit by tiny bit in that moment as well, felt to Haruyuki like a raging river flowing at a speed a thousand times faster than normal. If it were possible, he wanted to spend all of their remaining ten months together in the Accelerated World. By a rough calculation, an amount of time equivalent to the infinity of eight hundred and twenty years would pass on the other side, but he felt that even that would most certainly not be enough.
“Kuroyukihime,” he murmured out loud, squeezing the edge of the cushion.
“Hmm? What?”
He felt like he heard a voice coming from right beside him. Still facedown, Haruyuki repeated her name in an attempt to hear once again the reply of the phantom girl.
“Kuroyukihime.”
“And I said ‘what,’ Haruyuki?”
That voice included a gentleness and a doubt that was simply too real. Haruyuki, realizing that he had pushed himself to the limits of his own delusional imagination, rolled over toward the left.
And found before his eyes, a mere fifty centimeters or so away from the sofa, two legs wrapped in black stockings.
His eyes fluttered open and shut before he vacantly lifted his gaze. Skirt at the perfect above-knee length. Jet-black short-sleeved shirt with a soft brilliance. A deep red ribbon. From the slender neck equipped with a piano-black Neurolinker to the silky, flowing lengths of hair to the pale face possessing a somehow inhuman beauty, currently cocked to one side, a vision with overwhelming reality filled Haruyuki’s field of view.
Man, I really can’t underestimate my imagination. I mean, a vision so clear like this. Maybe I put it together with image data in my memory without realizing it. But do I have a full-body shot with this kind of high resolution…Haruyuki nonchalantly stretched out his right hand, grabbed the hem of the pleated skirt, and tugged at it.
Even the unbearably real sensations of the texture of the fabric and the mass and flexibility of the person beyond it were communicated to his fingers, and just as he started to wonder—
“Whaaa?!” He heard a cry of that nature and his hand was slapped away. Followed by: “Wh-wh-what are you doing, you idiot?!”
The roared rebuke poured down over him, and at the same time, a slender hand reached out and grabbed his cheek with three fingers to demonstrate their merciless pulling power.
“Hya…Haah?!” As he uttered this squeal/cry of surprise, Haruyuki understood.
She was real. She was not a hallucination, nor a photo, nor a 3-D artificial reality image. The genuine article, Kuroyukihime herself, had suddenly appeared in Haruyuki’s own living room, her beautiful eyebrows arched into a V. But why? How? Maybe she’d teleported? Electron coherence—?
Half a minute later, Kuroyukihime, having stretched out Haruyuki’s cheek to a point where she was satisfied, flopped back onto the opposite sofa and revealed her secrets.
“Look here! I very clearly rang the bell and everything! And then you—without even saying so much as the h of hello—unlocked the door, so having no other choice, I simply showed myself in. I called out in my actual voice from the entryway, you know!”
“Oh!”
A window had in fact opened up while he was thinking about the stuff with his face buried in the pillow and his ears blocked by his arms. He had just assumed it was a mail from his mother and pressed the confirmation button without even looking at the text. But that window had actually been to notify him of the intercom call.
It was his own fault for leaving the messaging noise set to its default, which sounded very similar to the intercom buzzer, and after making a note to himself in his internal memory not to forget to change that, Haruyuki sat up straight and opened his mouth again.
“Uh, ummm. I-it’s good to see you.”
“Mmm. Here I am,” Kuroyukihime replied, her lips still slightly pointed as she tugged down the hem of her skirt. It was a good thing he had pulled it toward him earlier. If he had tried to flip it up or something, he had no doubt he would definitely not have gotten off as lightly as a stretched-out cheek.
After this thought drifted through his head, Haruyuki realized that the gears of his brain had once again wandered into strange territory. And that wasn’t the issue anyway, it wasn’t about how Kuroyukihime had gotten into the house. The fundamental issue to be clarified straightaway—
“R-right, anyway, um. Why did you come all of a sudden?” He timidly gave voice to the question.
Judging from the fact that she was still in her school uniform and her school-specified bag was on the floor, Kuroyukihime had apparently come directly from Umesato JH. If she had something she needed to tell him, she could have done so in the meeting earlier where they reflected on how the Territories had gone. She could’ve mailed or called, too. So it was something for which none of that would suffice.
“It’s something that requires an incredibly high level of security…Is that it?” he added, attempting to get a jump on the situation, but Kuroyukihime cocked her head slightly and shrugged.
“No, not particularly…What? I don’t have the right to ever-so-occasionally come and hang out? Even though it appears that Takumu and Chiyuri visit rather frequently?”
She started to puff her cheeks out once more, so Haruyuki
moved his head back and forth in the horizontal direction at top speed.
“N-no, no, no, no, not at all! I-I-I-I’m really happy. Superhappy. I wouldn’t say anything if you were here every day, or even if you went ahead and moved right in. Oh! R-r-right, I’m sorry, I should offer you something! I’ll make some coffee right away; please sit down. Or I guess you’re already sitting down! Sorry!”
If he kept chattering like this, he was bound to say something he couldn’t take back, so he practically fell off the sofa onto his feet and escaped in a dash to the kitchen. A “No need to bother” mixed with an exasperated-seeming smile chased him, and his nervousness abated slightly.
It wasn’t any top secret Legion thing; she had just stopped by to hang out on her way home from school. As a regular junior high student, doing the sort of thing classmates often did.
The moment this thought crossed his mind, a laugh threatened to slip out of his mouth, and he had to work hard to keep it in as he pulled out the most expensive-looking bag of coffee beans from his mother’s collection in the cupboard and poured them into the percolator.
During the time that the cloudy sky beyond the window went from the color of lead to the black ink of night, Haruyuki chatted away as if in a dream. About the Territories that day. About recent events in the Accelerated World. About the race the next day.
And he didn’t leave it at topics related to Brain Burst; he chattered and talked and babbled about happenings and rumors at school, local Suginami issues, and even the 2047 summer models announced by the various Neurolinker companies.
“…But I think the large, high-performance Neurolinkers lately have gotten things essentially backward, you know? Like, they should be machines developed with wearability in mind, to the point where you can forget you even have one on. And yet the new Hitasu models coming out, I mean, an external unit for carrying around comes with them, standard!”