The Floating Starlight Bridge

  The slim back curled up even farther and from the depths, a dry voice resounded.

  “Rider has the right to resent me and the way I broke that vow. I don’t regret choosing the path of fighting the other Kings, but the sensation of that single blow alone stains my arms…And that’s why, Haruyuki. For a long time, I firmly refused to believe the rumors that former Burst Linkers lost their memories of the Accelerated World. Because I couldn’t allow myself to cling to such rumors, to let them ease my burden. But, two months ago, when we finally got proof that the rumors of memory loss were true…I was relieved. It confirmed that Rider no longer remembered that he had been the Red King or that he had been chased out because of my betrayal. I truly did heave a sigh of relief from the bottom of my heart. Honestly…I’m such a hopeless coward…Ha-ha-ha…”

  The figure of the pajama-clad Kuroyukihime laughing softly looked unusually weak and fragile. Haruyuki mustered up his minimal courage and shifted another five centimeters toward her.

  But, of course, he couldn’t actually touch her hand or anything like that; instead, he simply spoke in all earnestness. “K-Kuroyukihime. I think that knowing that this sort of memory-loss treatment is lying in wait, and yet still going out there and fighting, puts an incredible amount of pressure on us. B-but we went and found out about it. We have to just accept that fact and keep fighting. In which case, getting a little relief from that in exchange, there’s nothing cowardly about that. Maybe the opposite. I think it’s only right.”

  Kuroyukihime lifted her face a bit and glanced at Haruyuki. A pained, gentle smile bled onto her pale lips. “I see. That’s so like you, such a logical opinion. Right, you should be fighting with that kind of faith…However, I probably don’t have that right.”

  “Wh-why not?!”

  “Well, you see…Rider’s not the only Burst Linker who’s suffered an irreversible loss because of my Incarnate attack.”

  “That’s…” Haruyuki blinked several times and furrowed his brow. “Do you mean the fourth Chrome Disaster? B-but you didn’t have any choice there.”

  “No, that’s not it.” Kuroyukihime shook her head despondently, bound hair swinging. A few seconds later, she announced in a voice that was practically a sigh, “My…old friend. Before I made you my ‘child,’ she was the only person I was bound to by friendship in the real world as well…Fuko. Or rather, Sky Raker.”

  “…Huh…?”

  “The reason Chiyuri couldn’t recover Raker’s legs even with Citron Call after the Territories today was not because her will is at work. Mine is. Most likely, my will is even now eating into Raker’s scars and blocking any regrowth. Like a poison…Like a curse.”

  “That’s—! That’s not true!!” Haruyuki cried out in a trance. He shook his head fiercely and leaned forward as he argued vehemently. “Raker herself says that she basically forced you into it. Right up to the end, you tried to change her mind, but Raker wouldn’t listen no matter what you said, so you had no choice: You cut her legs off…Isn’t that what happened?!”

  “That’s exactly it, on the surface at least…” She buried her face in the cushion she was holding. “But…I was twelve at the time, even younger and more foolish than I am now. Rather than the path of fighting alongside me as Legion Submaster, she chose her longing for the sky…I couldn’t understand how she felt, how she was forced to that choice. In the end, once I grasped that Raker was never going to change her mind, my sadness…my anger…I put all these feelings into the blade of my right hand and amputated Raker’s legs. And in my heart at that time was most certainly the will that if that was how she wanted it, then she could lose her legs for the rest of time. That turned out to be a curse, one that lingers even now. It’s the same as the malice of the first Disaster that gave birth to the Armor of Catastrophe…”

  She put all the strength in her arms into squeezing the cushion. Her cracking voice flowed quietly in the dim bedroom.

  “Raker’s—and your—will is the materialization of hope. But mine’s not. Just the opposite. I overwrite with the power of rage, of resentment, of despair. Not building anything, not creating anything, just cutting things off, causing loss. As symbolized by the form of my ugly-in-the-extreme avatar…If you all keep fighting alongside me in the reborn Nega Nebulus—no, the Nega Nebulus that you all revived, I know you will…”

  The latter half of her speech faded into obscurity, and Haruyuki felt almost as if he were listening to Kuroyukihime’s soundless self-recrimination.

  No. No. You’re totally wrong.

  There’s no way despair and loss are your essential nature. Because you saved me. You offered me a sincere hand and pulled me up from the bottom of the blackest bog. You offered me the most overwhelming salvation!

  He shouted all this in his mind, but his ability to turn this vortex of emotion into words was decisively lacking. Haruyuki clenched his teeth and thought intently about how he could let her know just how she and Brain Burst itself had saved him.

  The answer he came up with after about five seconds was:

  “Kuroyukihime,” he said, pulled something out from a corner of the headboard, and gently offered it to her. It was an XSB cable covered in silver wire. With one plug in his left hand, he held the other in his outstretched right.

  “Kuroyukihime, please duel with me. If you do, I’m sure you’ll understand…how…how much you…” Haruyuki was unable to hold back the emotions rising up in him, and tears spilled out of his eyes. Sniffling, he took a deep breath and continued in a shaky voice. “…how truly important you are to me.”

  Kuroyukihime turned more than half her face to him now, eyes opened wide. A mixture of surprise, hesitation, and fear flitted across her face until it settled on a weak smile tinged with pain.

  “You do always surprise me,” she murmured, accepting the plug. However, instead of plugging it into her own Neurolinker, Kuroyukihime crossed the bed to sit on her knees, directly in front of Haruyuki. The scent of soap and shampoo wafted up, sending his awareness flying off, despite the current situation. She placed her left hand on his head and gently pulled his head toward her.

  “Now that I think about it, a one-on-one fight with you, this would be…” As she spoke, she fitted the plug into the terminal on his Neurolinker.

  “…Th-the first time,” he replied as he stretched out the hand with the plug toward Kuroyukihime’s Neurolinker, trying to keep it from trembling too much. He faced her, met her eyes, and at the same time, jacked in. In his vision, the wired connection warning flashed.

  The sensation that more than just the digital signals—that both of their consciousnesses were linked together—settled over him, and Haruyuki slowly called out the command.

  “Burst Link.”

  Thin legs covered in silver armor stepped down onto a cracked marble floor. The condo Haruyuki lived in had been transformed into a chalky temple. The walls dividing each house and each wall had all disappeared, and the entire floor had become a spacious atrium. The high ceiling was supported here and there by Greek-style pillars. A faint, pale yellow sun shone in through the external openings.

  A Twilight stage, the very stage in which Haruyuki had received his first lecture from Kuroyukihime.

  Finishing his check of his surroundings, he turned his gaze straight ahead to find a bewitching, elegant, obsidian avatar standing quietly some twenty meters away. Both hands, both feet, were long swords. An armor skirt resembling a flower petal encircled her slim waist, and both sides of her face mask glittered sharply.

  Rather than in an attack posture, the traitor of the Accelerated World, the Black King Black Lotus, had both hands by her sides, her head hanging slightly. However, the slender standing figure was emitting an intense pressure, making him feel as though he were standing below an enormous guillotine, and Haruyuki involuntarily sent a shiver running through Silver Crow’s slim body.

  No! This is not the time to lose your nerve! he shouted at himself beneath the silver mask.

  The re
ason why Haruyuki had asked for a duel with Kuroyukihime was extremely simple. He just wanted to let her know the faith he had in her as the Burst Linker who supported him.

  Brain Burst was, in essence, an online fighting game. And games were meant for having fun: the thrill, the excitement, the emotion of playing. And in the case of net games, the competition, the solidarity of fighting together. Players far and wide had the right to enjoy these. Games definitely did not exist to make people suffer.

  The sole method Haruyuki had of communicating this belief to Kuroyukihime was to muster everything he had and fight here and now like this. He had to challenge her using all his power, convinced as she was that her avatar and her Incarnate reflected despair, that she dragged any opponent she crossed blades with into that despair. And he had to make her remember the fun of the duel.

  And that’s why I—

  “I’m not holding back, Kuroyukihime!!” Shouting, Haruyuki kicked at the ground ferociously.

  Black Lotus did not move. However, without the slightest easing of the threatening presence emanating from her, she instantly raced a distance of twenty meters and pushed deep into the cracking marble.

  His first blow was the thing he was best at: a right straight punch. He rotated his hips and shoulders forward as far as possible, but at the last possible second, Kuroyukihime lightly ducked the blow. It aimed for the center of her body, and she dodged it by bending in half.

  Although she had accepted Haruyuki’s challenge, she was still held back by her own uncertainty. She wasn’t her usual top-notch self. She came back with a counterattack of a thrust with her right sword, but Haruyuki could clearly see the tip of it coming.

  He lined up the fingers of his right hand, stretched out before him. Bending his arm like a whip, he went to meet Kuroyukihime’s thrust with a sword-hand.

  Even though he hadn’t ever fought a direct duel with her, having fought alongside her in the Territories for the last six months, Haruyuki had noticed an extremely modest weak point in Kuroyukihime’s close-range fighting.

  The swords of Black Lotus’s limbs were fearsome weapons for both offense and defense, but because they were, in the end, swords, there was a directionality to that power. Specifically, the attack power was concentrated exclusively in the edge, and the flat of the sword was even fragile, in fact. Of course, they weren’t likely to snap at a single blow, but he could pile on the damage there. And if he was looking for a chance of winning in a close-range fight, that was the only place he was going to find it.

  “Hngah!”

  With a cry, Haruyuki hit the side of the blade plunging toward him with a stiff chop of his right hand. Or at least tried to.

  But the impact he anticipated didn’t happen. Instead: Soft…was the only way to describe the gentle response he felt, and Haruyuki was floored.

  The long jet-black sword caught Haruyuki’s chopping hand with a small circular motion from the outside. It couldn’t be, but to Haruyuki’s eyes, it looked like the sword had transformed into some flexible material and was capturing his arm in a spiral. But this was only a fleeting sensation—

  “Hah!” Here, Kuroyukihime allowed a brief exhalation and shook her right arm sharply as she took a step forward.

  Instantly, an explosive backlash slammed into Haruyuki’s arm, up to his shoulder and chest.

  “Wha—?!”

  By the time he cried out, he was already being sent flying backward helplessly. Unable to get control over his posture, he crashed into a round pillar off in the distance. The pillar collapsed with a rumble, and still unable to stop, Haruyuki tumbled along on the floor before finally halting, arms and legs splayed.

  He stared at the stars flickering before his eyes for more than a second before shaking his head and leaping to his feet. He managed somehow to keep himself from staggering, lifted his face, and shouted, “Wh-what was that just now?!”

  Kuroyukihime leisurely hovered closer from afar and shrugged lightly. “The way of the firm against the way of the flexible,” she replied. “I suppose we could call it something like that. One of these days, I’ll tell you about when I trained in the Chinatown area of Yokohama. Anyway, Haruyuki, didn’t you have something you wanted to tell me?”

  Her voice was calm, but Haruyuki was keenly aware of the single drop of desolation buried within it.

  So Kuroyukihime was currently caught up in emotions she normally kept buried. Her duels generated only a negative energy. There was not a single thing she could give to her opponent, not the excitement of battle, not the solidarity of fighting together. Or so she was firmly convinced.

  But you’re wrong! I am at maximum thrill right now! I’m not afraid. I’m shaking all over with real emotion, that someone as strong as you exists in this world…and that this person would fight with me.

  Haruyuki kept himself from shouting out and clenched his hands into fists. He was sure this wasn’t something he could communicate with words. Which was why he wanted to fight. He couldn’t shrink now just because she sent him flying once. He couldn’t be done here unless he put forward everything he had in him.

  “I’ll tell you with my fists!!” he yelled, and went into another dash.

  The attack that had knocked him on his back had also eaten nearly 20 percent of his health gauge. But in exchange, his special-attack gauge had also been charged. As he ran, he gradually deployed the metallic fins on his back.

  He abandoned his aim of trying to counter Black Lotus’s swords from the side and bet everything on a 3-D rush attack at zero distance, something he had been practicing in secret for a long time.

  “Unh…aaah!”

  Howling, he went for another long punch with his right hand. Kuroyukihime similarly came at him with a right thrust. With the difference in reach, he would get hit first if nothing changed.

  The glittering sword tip drew nearer, closed in, and the instant it was about to touch his helmet, Haruyuki vibrated just his left wing hard, once. With no advance warning, Silver Crow’s body slid to the right, and the sword passed by, sparks scattering from the side of his helmet.

  “…!”

  The sound of Kuroyukihime inhaling sharply. But with no sign of stopping, she whirled her body around, using the sword tip of her left leg as a pivot, and tried to dodge Haruyuki’s punch. He shook his right wing. His trajectory was once again corrected to the inside and—

  Clang! The modest and yet definite sound of impact was joined by sparks bouncing off Black Lotus’s left shoulder pauldron. And the health gauge in the upper right of his vision did indeed decrease, though by the smallest increment: a mere dot.

  Now!

  “Heeyaah!”

  Haruyuki let loose a battle cry and waved his left leg high. Common sense would have it that a high kick would never hit its target in this kind of close-quarters situation. This was because such a kick required a certain amount of distance from the end of the left leg, which was the axis of revolution, and the end of the right leg, which was in the position to generate damage.

  Perhaps surmising this, Kuroyukihime set herself up not to take the blow or to avoid it, but to counter with an elbow strike.

  But here again, Haruyuki momentarily turned the thrust in his left wing all the way up. With his forward-leaning body as an axis, the high kick sang through the air with a minimal turning radius that would normally be impossible.

  Kuroyukihime immediately canceled her elbow strike and threw her upper body back, but Silver Crow’s sharp toes scraped the left side of Black Lotus’s mask. Once again, sparks and minimal damage.

  Normally, after pulling out a fancy move, Haruyuki inevitably stiffened up. But now, he used his left leg to kick off the ground while the force of his right leg swung around. Kuroyukihime, on the other hand, sank down in preparation to jump backward, perhaps disliking the close contact.

  Another moment of thrust with his right wing. He jumped on the centripetal force generated and threw out a roundhouse kick from the left rear.

  Kuro
yukihime blocked with a bent left arm. Fierce impact. The orange flash effect colored the armor of both avatars and the surrounding marble.

  Noticing the gauge in his upper right drop by two dots on the edge of his vision, Haruyuki this time put all the reactive force of the kick into the thrust of his left wing. His body spun suddenly in the opposite direction, and using this energy, he sent his left spear hand shooting out over and over. His fingertips dug shallowly into Kuroyukihime’s right shoulder.

  When they were facing each other, he threw open both wings. A double-knee kick was just barely blocked by her right arm, and the biggest impact up to that point shook the stage. Damage: three dots.

  This kind of uninterrupted rush, which took advantage of the instantaneous thrust of his wings, was the secondary use for his flying ability that Haruyuki had spent hours and hours training to use in his special bullet-dodging training room. Name: Aerial Combo. Compared with the primary use, Dive Attack, it seemed rather staid at first glance, and he couldn’t hope to do much damage with it, but in addition to the fact that he could use it indoors, he could also activate it with just 20 percent in his special-attack gauge. And, most importantly, it was nearly impossible to handle when you were seeing it for the first time!

  “Aaaaah!”

  Pushing his whole body into an acceleration that made his nerves shiver and sing, Haruyuki increased the speed of his rush even more. Maintaining close quarters, he continued to shoot out attacks, his limbs almost never touching the ground. Black Lotus managed to just barely dodge or block all of them, but even still, the damage he carved out steadily whittled down her gauge.

  As he flitted about, totally absorbed in the battle, Haruyuki shouted in his mind, This is me now, Kuroyukihime. This is the full power of me, the person you pulled up from the swamps and gave wings. If your true nature is despair, if it’s loss that cuts everything away…then what is this fight now?!