An action that was immediately followed by a faint cry that seemed almost unreal after the previous angry roars of deep resentment. “Wh-wha—?! I-I’m flying…?!” Mask shaking from side to side, he shouted again. “Stop! Haru! D-don’t drop me!! If I fall now, I’ll…I’ll lose!!”
Both of their health gauges were dyed red and had dropped so that they were no more than a hair’s width. Cyan Pile stiffened as if fearing he’d be dropped if he moved, and his tone changed to one of supplication.
“I-if I lose…if I lose to you, and you’re level one, my points will drop to zero! Y-you’ll be fine. I mean, you’ll only lose four or five points! Please! Let me have this one, Haru! I can’t lose Brain Burst now!!”
“Taku…Takumu…” Half groaning, half muttering the name, Haruyuki firmly clenched his right fist, still piercing Cyan Pile.
Now? Now?! You tried to take all of Kuroyukihime’s points…You tried to erase her Brain Burst, her only desire!
All he had to do was change the angle of his arm slightly, and Cyan Pile’s enormous body would lose its support and go crashing into the ground far below. Takumu would lose forty points, and Brain Burst would be forcefully uninstalled. And then…he would never again be able to come after Kuroyukihime from outside the local net.
Haruyuki gritted his teeth hard enough to break them. His entire body shook, and a momentary impulse ran from head to foot before disappearing. The voice he pushed out from between his clenched teeth was so cracked, it didn’t even sound like his own. “Do you concede, Taku?”
“Wh-what?”
“That you totally cannot beat me in this accelerated world. Do you concede, Taku?!”
A moment’s silence.
The words returned through the body pressed against him were quiet, deflated somehow. “…Yeah. I do…I guess I can’t beat you, after all. Just like way back when we used to play all those games together…”
Haruyuki inhaled deeply and exhaled. And then he said in the same quiet voice, “Then…we’re equals.”
“Huh?! What…?!”
“In the real world, there’s not a single thing I can beat you at. But in this world, you can’t beat me. We’re equals. So…so—” Cutting himself off and staring at the bluish-white eyes under Cyan Pile’s mask, Haruyuki continued. “So you…be…be my ally, Taku. My friend. Fight as her servant from now on, like me.”
Speechless, Takumu gasped sharply. After a while, a hoarse moan slipped out from the thin slits. “…Idiot. You have to know this, too, Haru. I know you do. Your guardian…Black Lotus…I’ve been hunting her in secret from my own Legion. She’s the biggest traitor in the accelerated world! I mean…to fight on her side…”
“You’re right, she is. She took down the Six Kings of Pure Color. You can say it. It’s fine. And I’ll tell you something really good…Look, that’s how games are supposed to be.”
Takumu reacted to the words Haruyuki uttered with a long silence.
His response a few seconds later was tinged somehow with a masochistic laugh. “Haru, would you really trust me? Like, if I said yeah right now, what reason would you have at this point to trust what I say? After I broke my Legion’s rules, broke the rules of Brain Burst, and even betrayed both of my friends?”
“We’re going to go and tell Chiyu everything.” The second Haruyuki came back with this, Takumu gasped in shock again for what seemed like the hundredth time.
“What?!”
“Brain Burst, us fighting, and…all the feelings you and I have been hiding. We tell her everything.” Haruyuki turned his gaze off into the infinite sky and continued slowly. “We probably have to start there. The three of us have been hiding things we shouldn’t have. We’ve been suspicious of stuff we didn’t have to be. Somewhere…we have to start over.”
“…Start over…You really think we can, Haru? I…Chi’s Neurolinker…” Takumu’s voice shook as he spoke, and Haruyuki lightly patted his back with the stub of his left arm.
“She’ll probably be so mad, she’ll kill us. She’ll yell and get mad…but she’ll forgive us in the end. That’s how she is,” Haruyuki said with a smile as he started to slowly descend.
Having returned to the hospital roof and been released from Silver Crow’s right arm, Cyan Pile sank down to the ground with a thud after a few staggering steps.
Haruyuki glanced up to check the remaining time. In a little more than two minutes, the long fight would be over. Just in case, he checked his gauge, but the remaining health was exactly the same number for both of them. If they timed out like this, the result would be a draw, and no points would be transferred either way.
Haruyuki looked over again at Cyan Pile, motionless, head hanging between raised knees, and thought to himself, I…Did I make a mistake? Should I have shown no mercy and dropped Takumu into the ground back there to make completely sure he couldn’t break his promise after this fight and come after Kuroyukihime?
No. No, I can’t. Suspecting people, trusting people, it means suspecting yourself, trusting yourself.
I trust the me who Kuroyukihime told she likes.
I trust the me who decided to believe Takumu.
That’s enough.
Immediately after he told himself this, the elevator doors opened behind him, and a heavy metallic noise reverberated through the air.
His whole body stiffened with a start, and in the instant before he spun around, Haruyuki guessed who he would see before him and was then certain of it.
It couldn’t possibly be a new enemy. Because the only people who could attack and be attacked in this stage were Haruyuki and Takumu. And it wouldn’t be an unfamiliar duel avatar. There was no reason for an unconnected spectator to appear from within the hospital.
However, the moment he actually confirmed his hunch with his own eyes, Haruyuki stopped breathing, his chest was full of something hot, and tears spilled out of both eyes.
A pure black, as if a distillation of the essence of darkness. Edges gilded in a dazzling silver. The cold wind blowing past made the long rolls of hair and the hem of the skirt flutter, and the bells decorating the parasol rang softly.
“Kuro…yukihime…” His wrung-out voice trembled faintly like a small child’s.
Watching Haruyuki dragging his shattered leg, taking one step, then another, Kuroyukihime’s face twisted up and broke into a grin at the same time.
“Kuroyukihime!!” Finally able to cry out in a proper voice, Haruyuki ran as fast as he could, making an irregular metallic noise.
Kuroyukihime also ran toward him, high heels ringing out sharply.
Both stretching arms out straight ahead, neither showed the slightest hesitation or timidity in leaping into the open arms of the other.
Hugging her sweet, softly scented body with all his might, Haruyuki cried, almost groaning, “You…you’re awake!! I’m so glad…I knew it, I knew it. I knew you’d make it…I’m so glad…so glad…”
Kuroyukihime, holding onto Haruyuki as if wrapping him up, snuggled against his cheek silently for a moment. “In the darkness, no heaven, no earth…All I heard was your voice. I…You saved me. And got hurt so badly…” The whispered voice that finally echoed in his ear was similarly wet.
Her right hand gently stroked Silver Crow’s broken body. “You’re shattered…Thank you. Thank you, Haruyuki.”
“No…you’re the one who saved me. Because you told me…to believe in myself, so…I could fly.”
Nodding silently several times, Kuroyukihime stretched a hand out to trace the edge of a thin wing extending from Haruyuki’s back. “They’re beautiful…This is your power, the potential hiding in Silver Crow. Until now…there’s never been a duel avatar realizing the ability of pure flight. I knew my prediction wasn’t mistaken. You really are the one who’s going to change this world.”
Kuroyukihime gently brought Silver Crow’s small body down to the ground with both hands. Tilting her head to the side and smiling, she looked down at him, and the ephemeral silhouette of the fa
iry princess spoke in a slightly forceful tone. “It seems the time has come…the time when I must also emerge from my safe cocoon and aim for the sky again.”
She glanced behind her. Cyan Pile, seated a ways off, head still hanging, had raised his eyes only slightly to watch the two of them.
“You as well…I’ve wronged you, eh, Cyan Pile?” The words Kuroyukihime uttered were unexpected. “On more than one occasion, I sullied Duels with you, Duels that should have been full of honor. Shall I show you now? My true form. And if you wish it, I will engage you with all my might.” She raised her right hand to quickly move her virtual cursor.
Suddenly, the fairy princess avatar was shrouded in repeated surges of black lightning.
Her silhouette, engulfed in a bluish-purple light before Haruyuki, who hurried to take a few steps back, began to change shape slowly, bit by bit. The skirt that reached nearly to the floor shortened all at once and split into sharp notches. Hands and feet snapped out into perfectly straight lines, tips converged into needles. The long hair dissolved and disappeared in the light, and in its place, a mask appeared in the shape of a bird of prey, wings stretching out to the back. Finally, one last, terrible bolt of lightning struck, and all the effects disappeared.
Standing before them was a beautiful—extraordinarily beautiful, as if carved out of a black crystal—duel avatar.
Her overall form resembled Silver Crow somehow. But she was much taller, more than 170 centimeters. Her body, encased in flowing, seemingly transparent black armor with a straight line at its core, was slender like a doll’s and connected to an armor skirt resembling a black lotus around her hips.
More than anything else, the limbs were her main feature. Both arms and both legs were long, sharp swords, enough to send a chill up the spine. The bright, glittering edges that looked as though they could immediately bisect anything touching them rang out crisply in the slight wind of the stage. The front surface of the angular head, with a V reaching out behind it, was a pair of goggles like an inky black mirror. Inside, two bluish-purple eyes shone with a humming, vibrating sound.
Haruyuki just stood there for a moment as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Farther off, he sensed Cyan Pile, similarly speechless. Both were overwhelmed at the almost violent beauty of this figure and the boundless potential seeming to radiate from the slender, pitch-black body.
Haruyuki was convinced that if he found himself in a Duel with her, he wouldn’t have to wait more than a second before he was sliced into thin pieces and eliminated. Finally, he pushed a voice somehow resembling a sigh from his chest. “You’re beautiful…so beautiful…Before, you said you were ugly, but…you’re not at all…”
“Mm. I wonder…” Only the voice was the original Kuroyukihime’s. “I don’t even have any hands to hold someone else’s—” She didn’t get to finish.
Cries of surprise filled the air all at once at an incredible volume from the surrounding buildings.
“Whoooaaa! Oooooh?!”
“That’s…That duel avatar…!”
“Black Lotus!! The Black King!! She’s alive!!”
The shouts from the Gallery were clearly several times louder than at the appearance of the flying Silver Crow.
Kuroyukihime glanced around and shrugged lightly before saying, “Well then…Silver Crow. Perhaps you could fly away with me?”
“Huh? Uh, sure.”
No matter how great her potential, she didn’t actually weigh any more than Cyan Pile. But however willing he was to fly off with her, there was still the question of how.
In front of Haruyuki in his confusion, Kuroyukihime hovered with a faint vibration noise and turned to her right casually before raising both arms and dropping her hips. Almost as if she was urging him to pick her up and carry her across an unknown threshold.
Although he wondered at this, he could definitely not run away here, not at this point. Sweat dripped across the surface of his silver helmet—or rather, he had that illusion as he awkwardly stuck out both arms and fastened them around Kuroyukihime’s waist.
“Please and thank you,” she said, sounding somehow excited, before leaning back into his arms with a slight thump.
As Takumu, seated, gave them a slightly teasing look that he could well have been imagining, Haruyuki readied himself and lifted the black crystal avatar. Fortunately, she turned out not to be so heavy, and he made the fins on his back vibrate fiercely before kicking off with one foot. Accelerating moderately, he aimed for the sky.
Against his chest, Kuroyukihime craned her neck to look out at the city below them and cried out in a subdued voice, “This is…amazing! I could get addicted to this…The next time we direct and have a Duel, I want to spend the whole thirty minutes flying…Oh, here’s good.”
“Okay.” Nodding, Haruyuki switched to hovering.
They weren’t so high up. Below them, they could clearly make out the countless duel avatars looking up at them from the roofs of the buildings, still yelling and shouting.
Kuroyukihime drew in a deep breath and shouted in a crisp voice that seemed to reach all the way to the distant horizon. “Hear me!!”
In an instant, the entire stage fell into silence.
“Hear me! You Burst Linkers before me, Legions of the Six Kings! My name is Black Lotus! I am the one who fought against the rule of the usurper kings!”
The twisting black clouds grew shorter and even the blowing wind held its breath. The only thing still moving in his field of view was the timer with ten seconds left on the clock. In the quiet, the ringing proclamation echoed endlessly.
“I and my Legion Nega Nebulus come forth from behind the veil of obscurity to destroy this false peace! Take out your swords! Call up your flames! The time to fight…has come!!”
9
Indian summer.
What month is that again? Haruyuki wondered as he walked along the road to the now–completely familiar hospital. The rhythm the soles of his shoes tapped out on the paving stones increased unconsciously. If I keep speeding up, I’ll be covered in sweat by the time I get there, he thought, but even so, he couldn’t hold back.
Today was the day Kuroyukihime would finally be moved from the ICU to a general ward.
Since visits were naturally not permitted in the ICU, it had in fact been three weeks since they’d actually seen each other face-to-face. So he really couldn’t help it if he was a little lighter on his feet today.
The instant classes were over, he’d dashed out of school, so the sun was still high, and the light, warm for October, beat down on his back. At the school gates, the newspaper club shock troops who had somehow managed to get wind of the news were standing waiting, but he’d activated his now-rusty run-and-escape skill and had managed to break away beyond the reach of the local net.
The fact that he was so lighthearted was also partly because yesterday, Sunday, he had hung out with his oldest friends for the first time in a very long time.
Except for when they went up the new Tokyo Tower and Haruyuki accidentally connected to the sightseeing guide net and ended up getting challenged to a Duel (with the super-high-altitude local advantage, he just barely won), it was a very problem-free, fun day off.
The day of the fight three weeks earlier, Haruyuki and Takumu had gone together to Chiyuri’s house and confessed everything in Chiyuri’s bedroom, all of it: the reason Takumu told Chiyuri he liked her two years before, why Takumu had been gradually pressed against a wall since then, and why now, all of a sudden, Haruyuki and Takumu had pitted themselves against each other in battle.
Chiyuri had a hard time believing that Brain Burst actually existed. They finally managed to get her to accept it after they accelerated and took care of all the homework Chiyuri had been given that day in one-point-eight seconds, but the biggest hurdle was still ahead.
When Takumu told Chiyuri about the back-door virus he got from his guardian, the Blue Burst Linker who served as his kendo team captain, that he had used to infect her, Chiyuri ex
ploded many times more fiercely than Haruyuki had predicted, chasing them both out of her apartment, screaming all the while that she hated them and they were through forever.
The following week, Chiyuri wouldn’t talk to them, but over time, she made allowances in her own way for Takumu’s feelings, and she forgave them—almost like she wondered if she was part of the reason Takumu felt forced to that extreme—on the condition that they treat her to all the finest parfaits she could eat.
The truth of the matter was that Chiyuri and Takumu were still somehow awkward together, even now. But Haruyuki believed that time would fix that, too.
Because it had taken ten years, but Haruyuki and Takumu finally had the relationship Chiyuri wanted. They really were best friends.
In fact, they were probably more than that.
Silver Crow and Cyan Pile were now a tag team fighting side by side in Kuroyukihime’s Legion.
Smiling and saying hello to the female nurse whose face he had at this point memorized, Haruyuki signed into the hospital net and set his sights on the hospital’s top floor at the limits of permissible speed. He got out of the elevator he had used in the Duel and arrived at the navigation line leading to the room number he had sent by mail.
In the middle of the bouquet of pink baby’s breath and the tropical water lilies in his right hand was a bud that was as close to black as possible. Since it was out of season, it had cost more than he had expected, and he had ended up spending what little money he’d been saving up for a new game on it, but he had somehow lost the desire to buy new games anyway. No game in the world could possibly be as stimulating as Brain Burst.
After he had taken just a few steps, the navigation line abruptly disappeared from sight. In front of him was the sliding door of a private room in the southeast corner of the top floor.