The Floating Starlight Bridge

  “Whatever. If it’s a miss, I can just go to that retro game shop in Akihabara.” He offered those consoling words to his lonely self and got on the Chuo Line.

  He changed to the Hanzomon Line at Kinshicho and by the time he got off at Oshiage station, the town was at last sinking into evening. He turned around slowly on the sidewalk and heaved a sigh of relief the instant he spotted it in the sky.

  Living in Tokyo, he almost never went to the city’s famous places, so this was still only the second time he had been to Skytree. The enormous tower and its truss construction glittering gold in the western sun rose up sharply like a ladder to the heavens.

  A total of six hundred and thirty-four meters high, each side of the base was seventy meters. It had already been thirty-five years since it was built, but this broadcast tower was still the tallest building in Japan. He stood stock-still and simply took in its majesty for a while before hurrying toward it.

  He paid the student entry fee at the gate and got on the high-speed elevator. The cabin started its ascent with a grinding acceleration, and an exhilaration still different from vertical takeoff in the virtual world came over him. As he had two days earlier when they climbed the government office, he unconsciously pressed himself up against the glass wall. If Chiyuri had been there next to him, she would no doubt have said, in an exasperated way, “You really do like high places, huh?”

  A minute or so later, the elevator arrived at the observation deck and ejected Haruyuki along with a few tourists.

  Somehow keeping himself from immediately running to the window, he glanced around at his surroundings. It being a weekday evening, there were very few minors. And the few that were there were university students on what looked like dates or young children with their parents. He didn’t see anyone in junior or senior high school loitering around without an obvious purpose—in other words, anyone likely to be a Burst Linker.

  Naturally, he could have also just connected his Neurolinker to the facility’s local net, accelerated, and checked the matching list, but doing so on a closed net carried the risk, albeit slight, of being outed in the real. And supposing he did anyway, the only thing he could do when he found another Burst Linker’s name was duel, and that wasn’t his goal on that particular day.

  Thus, Haruyuki gave up on his visual scan of the spacious observation deck and walked over to the windows on the west side.

  The absolute height itself was far greater than that of the government office in Shinjuku, and the view of the city spreading out below the clear night sky was the very definition of overwhelming. With large skyscrapers popping up here and there among tiny speck-like buildings jammed together, it was almost like an old-school circuit board. Moving his gaze beyond all this, he found the majestic figure of Mount Fuji lying hazily in the distance outside of the bewitching city. To the upper left, the setting sun, its rays shooting down onto the horizon, held a belt of black clouds, promising more rain the next day.

  When he turned his face up even farther, the hues of the sky shifted from a madder red to a gentle violet. Jets flew in, wingtip lights blinking and winking. Sightseeing airships floated lazily overhead.

  Right now, high above this sky, a man-made object four thousand kilometers long is coming toward us at the hypersonic speed of Mach ten. The instant the thought popped into his head, Haruyuki let out a gasp. The world’s so big. Vast. It’s just way too macro.

  I’m sure the reason I love to look up at the sky is because I get this feeling. I’m fat and pathetic and short, but when everything else becomes relatively micro like this, it doesn’t matter. That feeling. It’s like a temporary escape or something.

  And I know it’s the same thing when I’m Silver Crow and out there flying. In those moments, I can feel with my whole body the absurd scale of the Accelerated World. Compared with the infinite nature of space and time there, even the mountain’s worth of problems I have are nothing more than a momentary speck popping modestly up on the surface of the ground. It’s only when I’m touching the sky that I can believe that.

  …But…

  Then why did You look to the sky? I mean, why do You still look to the sky? It can’t be that You want to experience that fleeting liberation the way I do. If that was your goal, then You have more than enough power in the Gale Thruster to make that happen. So why on earth…? What is it that You want in the sky…?

  These questions Haruyuki asked in his heart were naturally directed at his other teacher, Sky Raker.

  He then came up with some kind of vague answer to them. Of course, he didn’t know if he was right. Or rather, it wasn’t a matter of right or wrong. Only when Raker flapped her wings of her own volition once more and raced through the sky would the answer appear.

  Which was why Haruyuki being at the Skytree now and waiting for a portal to appear was probably a complete waste of time. If Raker shook her head with her usual gentle smile and told him she had no intention of going, that would be the end of it.

  But, Haruyuki thought, no matter how deep the wounds she carries, Sky Raker’s still a Burst Linker. Which meant that she shouldn’t be able to sit there and not be excited once she learned about a new field in the Accelerated World, and one that was a bridge stretching out four thousand kilometers up into the sky at that.

  Just like the excitement was building in Haruyuki’s own heart at that very moment.

  As he took in the view of evening in central Tokyo, his time display rolled around to half past five. The predicted time for the appearance of the portal that Kuroyukihime had calculated precisely was 5:34:42. At that moment, Hermes’ Cord, soaring in a waveform orbit centered on the equator, would be closest to Tokyo.

  He waited impatiently for the minutes to pass until there were only five seconds to go, and he connected his Neurolinker to the global net.

  At three seconds to go, he took a deep breath. At two seconds, he squeezed both eyes shut. And then with one second left, Haruyuki shouted in a voice that only he could hear, “Burst Link!!”

  Skreeeeee!!

  The noise of acceleration crashed over his body.

  Opening his eyes slowly, he saw the frozen blue of the initial accelerated space. Everything—the city unfolding outside the windows, the floor and pillars of the observation deck, the smattering of tourists—had turned to transparent crystal and was still. In the form of his pink pig avatar, Haruyuki gently stepped away from his real-world body. After taking one, then two steps backward, he suddenly whirled around.

  Normally, the café and merchandise shops sat in the center of the spacious observation deck, but at that moment, they had been completely wiped away; it was nothing more than deserted floor space now. However, no matter how hard he rubbed his eyes, there wasn’t even a switch, much less a portal there. Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot for nearly ten seconds before heaving a sigh.

  I guess the idea that a Space stage would show up was just a childish fantasy after all, he murmured to himself, and was about to plop down onto the expansive floor when—

  Intense light mingled with vibration abruptly slammed into his entire body, sending him leaping upward. He lifted his face with a gasp; an enormous object was in the process of springing forth in the center of the flat space.

  Stairs drawing broad arcs gradually rose up one at a time from the floor. On top of these a circular stage appeared, spinning, and then six slender pillars soared upward, carving out a regular hexagon. The transparent pillars held a pulsating blue light inside. As if in sync with this, shimmering particles rose up vertically from the centers of the pillars, stretching out almost to the ceiling, glittering beautifully.

  “…This…It’s the portal to Hermes’ Cord…,” Haruyuki muttered hoarsely, and stood up. The despair he had felt only a moment earlier was completely forgotten, and he clenched the right fist of his pig avatar tightly. So his guess hadn’t been wrong. Who was it, again, who’d called it “childish fantasy”?

  He raced over to the stairs, and without even a mom
ent’s concern or hesitation, he raced up the staircase on hoofed legs. Vmm, vmm. He slipped toward the center of the circle through gaps in the six pillars, which hummed the low song of that omnipresent vibration. For the final step, he brought his feet together and jumped. But those feet did not come back into contact with the floor.

  “Whoa?!” Haruyuki yelped as he watched his own pig avatar be broken down into countless particles of light. It was actually more like returning to his origins than being broken down. As proof that his virtual proxy was being returned to essential information, the white particles were made up of minute chunks of digital code.

  Immediately after he noticed this, Haruyuki felt his consciousness ascend vertically at an incredible speed. But there were absolutely no Gs accompanying the takeoff. He simply became massless light, shot through the upper structures of the Skytree, and flew off into the sky.

  And there his view was completely whited out.

  The cessation of sensation lasted only a few seconds.

  First, Haruyuki heard the hard clack of his own feet touching the ground. Weight abruptly returned to his body and he involuntarily fell to one knee. In this crouching posture, he ever-so-tentatively opened his eyes.

  The first thing he saw was the HP gauge in the top left of his field of view. Huh? he thought and stuck out both hands to stare at them. There, he found five sharp fingers on each, glittering silver. There was no doubt, these were the familiar arms of Silver Crow.

  He panicked at the fact he was his duel avatar even though no duel had started, wondering if this was the lawless Unlimited Neutral Field, but he soon noticed that in the center of his green HP gauge, the English word LOCKED was displayed. Unable to immediately grasp the meaning of this, he twisted his head around for a while before deciding to put the question off for the time being. He took a deep breath, and here finally lifted his head to face forward.

  “Wh-whoaaaaaa?!” he shouted and fell back onto his butt from the force of jerking his head back. Heedless of the awkward pose this put him in, he simply stared at the scene before his eyes.

  The metal floor Haruyuki was sitting on ended a mere meter ahead of him. Beyond that was…sky. And clouds. The surface of the Earth below.

  It should have been a familiar sight, considering that he could fly. But this was on an entirely different scale. It was so high up. Several times—no, maybe ten or more times the fifteen hundred meters that was the upper limit for the altitude Silver Crow could reach. The sky was dyed a deep ultramarine, and the clouds formed thin streaks or enormous vortexes far below, while the sea was indigo, and the land was hazy brown and green. If he fell from a place like this, he would probably be burned up from the friction with the atmosphere before he took any damage from the crashing descent.

  Unconsciously, he inched backward, and once he was three or so meters from the edge and its lack of railings, he finally expelled the breath he was holding. He stood up from his prone position and at last looked around to both sides.

  The gray metal terrace appeared to be in the shape of a large circle. Following the line of it, he naturally looked back. And…

  In the center of the ring-shaped terrace was a curved wall.

  No, not a wall. A pillar. An extremely thick pillar, looking to be about a hundred meters in diameter, stretched up vertically. Haruyuki was standing on the broad floor at its flange base.

  “Is this…Hermes’ Cord?” Haruyuki’s voice was barely a whisper as he stared dumbfounded at the structure, an enormous tower, a would-be residence for the gods. The metal glittered sharply like stainless steel and stretched up endlessly toward the other side of a sky that changed from ultramarine to a deep indigo, the top of the structure melting into the vanishing point, completely invisible.

  The space elevator in the real world was composed of several cables made from intertwined carbon nanotubes bunched together. It was barely two meters thick, more accurately referred to as a “rope” rather than a “pillar.”

  But the object re-created in the Accelerated World that towered now before Haruyuki’s eyes was nothing other than a pillar. It was a tower floating high up in the sky on a superhuge scale, several thousands of meters tall and a hundred meters in diameter. Why on earth would it have been expanded to this size?

  He could think about it all day long and still not come to any answers, but he felt like all this was merely the details. The key point here was that there really was a Space stage. No, he probably should say that the place he was standing now was a High Altitude stage. In which case, if he climbed this enormous tower, a true space environment likely awaited…

  “This is way bigger than I thought it’d be.”

  Haruyuki nodded firmly at the voice on his right. “Yeah. Compared with this, Skytree’s a toothpick.”

  “Instead, though, there’re almost no details on the surface. I wonder if there’s an interior structure.”

  “But I don’t see anything that looks anything like a door…Uh.”

  Gulp.

  His entire body stiffened. Haruyuki jumped up adroitly and whirled ninety degrees to his right, shouting, “Gah?! Wh-wh-wh-wh-who-who-who-wh-wh-wh-wh-when-when—”

  Who are you?! When did you get here?!

  That’s what he intended to cry out as a sharp challenge, but nothing more than a series of strange noises came from his mouth. The silhouette looking down on him expressionlessly from extremely close up as he did was—

  Slender, dark red body. Sturdy thighs and forearms. Hands with sharp claws extended. Sleek tail flicking.

  And from the mask with pointed ears sticking up from toward the back of the head and eyes shining silver, there was no doubt that this was a close-range duel avatar, one of the strongest Haruyuki had come across.

  “P…P-P-P-P-Pard?! Wh-wh-what are you d-doing here?!”

  “Pard,” aka Blood Leopard, level-six Burst Linker belonging to the Red Legion, Prominence, popped her shoulders up and replied, “Same reason you’re here.”

  “Huh…”

  His interlocutor was quite calm, so Haruyuki also finally calmed down a little and belatedly got ahold of the situation.

  Traveling to this place most certainly wasn’t a privilege that had been given to Haruyuki alone. Any Burst Linker who learned of the news of the placement of the social cameras in Hermes’ Cord could consider the possibility of a new stage being added to the Accelerated World, and then guess that the time and location of the portal’s appearance would be here, and then be able to arrive as he had.

  He was a little happy that another player had had the same foolhardy thought as he had and actually come all the way to Skytree like this, and a grin broke out across his face. But he soon arrived at another thought and his whole body froze.

  And that was that it wouldn’t have been at all strange for one new avatar after another to appear there at that moment. He whirled his head around hurriedly at their surroundings, but he didn’t get any sense that a third person was about to show up.

  As Haruyuki freaked out that it was too late to do anything, Pard spoke to him in a voice that was the tiniest bit exasperated.

  “The reason you came through the portal first is because you dared to accelerate right there on the observation deck. I dove in the toilet on the first floor, so I was a little late. I’m pretty sure anyone else is going to be putting priority on keeping from being outed in the real, so we should have a few minutes’ leeway still.”

  “O-oh. You did? Oh, right, I guess…” Feeling a belated terror at his own recklessness, Haruyuki now greeted Pard properly. “H-hello. Good to see you.”

  He bowed his head at Leopard, who waved her right hand dismissively and continued. “I am forever in your debt. I can only offer my apologies for communicating via nothing but mail after events took place…”

  These words were in thanks for how very much Pard had helped in resolving the enormous predicament Haruyuki had been trapped in two months earlier. The leopard-headed avatar shrugged her shoulders and r
esponded at unusual length.

  “NP. You really helped me out that time, too. The info you gave me was really useful in finding the security hole at Akiba BG. But right now”—she patted Haruyuki on the back, urging him to move—“we should use this advantage, since we have it. Let’s take a look around the pillar.”

  “O-okay!”

  As he walked, Haruyuki felt a keen relief at the fact that Blood Leopard was the avatar who had shown up after he did, since they shared such a history. They might have been members of different Legions, but they could still get along. If it had been Frost Horn, he would no doubt have grabbed Haruyuki from behind without saying a word and tossed him down to the Earth below.

  They cut across the flange, about twenty meters wide, approached the pillar of Hermes’ Cord itself, and even touched it, but the glittering alloy-like surface was unmoved. Despite details like seams in steel plating, there were no handholds that would allow a person to scale it.

  Pard scratched at the pillar with her razor-like claws and discovered that it was too hard for her to make a mark on. Curious, she walked around to the right, with Haruyuki trailing along behind her. The pillar diameter was at least a hundred meters, so following the curved surface all the way around was no mean feat. When the backside of the transport device finally came into sight, Haruyuki noticed something and cried out.

  “Ah! There’s something there!”

  He raced over, footfalls clacking.

  At first glance, the objects appeared to be cars or boats. The streamlined vehicles, six or so meters in length, sat neatly in a line on an angled platform at the base of the pillar, glaring up at the peak of Hermes’ Cord. Ten of them.

  The vehicles had no roofs; the seating area was completely open. At the very front was an operator’s seat for one person behind a transparent windshield. Behind that were two rows of two-person seats. Instead of tires, the vehicles were equipped with four large discs on the bottom, which seemed to be some kind of propulsive device. The smooth lines of the slender bodies created a form that hearkened back to the original meaning of the word shuttle.