Kuroyukihime’s Return

  “Ummmm.” Haruyuki swallowed with a gulp and rehearsed in his mind what he should say. Congratulations…That’s good, right? No, wait, it’s not like she’s been discharged from the hospital yet. Maybe that’s kinda weird. Good job…That’s obviously wrong. It’s been a while…Something like that? But we see each other every day on the net. Um, aah, I don’t know.

  Shmp.

  The door in front of him abruptly slid open, and Haruyuki, flustered, jumped back.

  As he did, a scolding voice came from inside. “Look, you. Just how long do you intend to make me wait? Hurry up and get in here!”

  “Uh, okay!” he cried in a pitiable voice, and, pulling his shoulders in as far as they would go, Haruyuki took an exaggerated step over the threshold. Once he heard the door close behind him, he timidly raised his face.

  In that instant, the large room, the scene outside the window, even the large bed disappeared from view. Haruyuki’s eyes took in only this girl he hadn’t seen in three weeks, wearing a black cardigan over cute pink pajamas.

  She was a little thinner, maybe. Her skin, already pale, had lost even more color so that it was almost translucent. The normally free-flowing, silky hair was tied up tightly in braids, and her right leg was completely covered in a large cast.

  But…

  Those eyes. Those large, pitch-black eyes alone shone exactly as they always had, as if they had stars locked up inside them, welcoming Haruyuki.

  Kuroyukihime smiled like a flower opening up and said in a slightly hoarse voice, “Hey…it’s been a while, Haruyuki.”

  “Uh…uh-huh.”

  All the lines he had thought up flew out of his head, and Haruyuki simply nodded sharply, blinking several times.

  After they had stared at each other like this for nearly ten seconds, Haruyuki finally returned to his senses and took a few steps forward to offer up the modest bouquet. “Uh…um, here. It’s small, but…”

  “Thanks.” Kuroyukihime grinned, taking them from him. She brought them to her face and inhaled their scent. “Black lotus, hm? I look forward to it blooming. There’s a vase over there. Could you put them in water for me?”

  “Okay!”

  Haruyuki took the small vase from the sideboard, filled it with water in the sink in a corner of the room, put the flowers in it, and returned.

  Once again, silence.

  It was Kuroyukihime who untangled their eyes glancing past each other. The expression on her face became suddenly severe and, clearing her throat lightly, she said in an increasingly hard tone, “Now then…shall I hear you report on that matter? Sit in the chair there.”

  “Oh…O-okay.”

  Right, this is no time to be giddy. Feeling a tinge of sadness at the thought, Haruyuki gently lowered his body into the guest chair.

  Flicking around on his virtual desktop, he slid the report he had put together over to Kuroyukihime. “Ummm…so, for the back-door program that Taku’s guardian had several of his subordinates test in absolute secrecy, a patch for the matching server came out last week, and it’s completely unusable now. This guardian was ‘executed’ within the Blue Legion. I mean, it looks like he had all of his points taken away from him. But he still didn’t spill the beans about who the program’s creator was.”

  “Hm, I see.” Kuroyukihime exhaled shortly and rested her head on intertwined fingers. “Most likely, a yellow, expert at exploiting weaknesses, was the originator. Especially given that whoever it was had it tested out on the top brass of an enemy Legion. Well, one of these days, I’ll yank that black curtain up.” Muttering this dangerous line as she moved the tips of the fingers of her right hand like a sword, Kuroyukihime recomposed her expression and looked at Haruyuki. “So how is it? My Legion.”

  “Right…well, I have to say it’s bit by bit, but we’re slowly getting control of Suginami Area numbers three and four.”

  “Ha-ha-ha!” Kuroyukihime’s shoulders shook lightly as she laughed. “A modest territory. But it’s wonderful. Just right for a Legion made up of three people.”

  The Black Legion, Nega Nebulus, was once an enormous group, ranked alongside the Legions of the six kings, but with the events two years earlier, it had apparently gone the way of dissolution and disappearance. Her spectacular proclamation of the Legion’s return was fine as far as it went, but as of now, the only three members were Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki, and Takumu. And Black Lotus, as the world’s most powerful traitor, wouldn’t be able to appear in any Duels for the time being. They had their hands full just protecting the field around Umesato Junior High.

  As if reading Haruyuki’s mind, Kuroyukihime said, smiling, “Don’t be so down. There’s no need to hurry. We’ll gain companions gradually and slowly expand our area.”

  “R-right.” Haruyuki nodded.

  When he went to wipe away the slight sweat beading on his face because of this first real-life meeting in some time, he stuck his hand in the pocket of his uniform, where his fingers struck something other than his handkerchief. He pulled the completely forgotten item out. The student agenda with the blue cover that had never been used for its original purpose. Kuroyukihime’s.

  “Oh…right. I was hanging on to this for you. Here.” Not thinking too hard about what he said, he offered her the agenda.

  Seeing it, Kuroyukihime blinked with surprise and opened her mouth slightly before her cheeks suddenly flushed bloodred. Snatching the agenda away from him, she pressed it to her chest and turned her face downward. “Did you look inside?” A question uttered in a voice that was almost disappearing.

  Haruyuki finally grasped the reason for Kuroyukihime’s reaction. “Oh! No! Yes! No, uh, well…I—I did…”

  Silence.

  Abruptly, a short phrase cut through the extremely dense, frozen air. “Forget it.”

  “…Huh?”

  “Erase it from your memory and never speak of it again. And if you mention this in the future, you’ll learn exactly what someone with level-nine special attacks can do.”

  Eeaah?!

  Swallowing this cry, Haruyuki shook his head vehemently. “I won’t say anything! I won’t remember it! Oh, I’ve forgotten, I’ve already completely forgotten it!”

  She glared sideways at Haruyuki dripping with sweat, standing at attention, and a chastising smile rose up on her face. “Honestly. Even though the name Silver Crow is known across the accelerated world at this point, you’re still the same old you, aren’t you, Haruyuki?”

  Slightly releasing the tension in his shoulders, Haruyuki returned, “A- and this scary part of you hasn’t changed at all, either…Black Lotus.”

  “Well, that’s unexpected. I’m always so kind…Anyway, Haruyuki.” She cleared her throat with a cough and sat up straight again before continuing with a gentle smile, “Maybe it’s time for you to get it together and just call me by my name, instead of my nickname.”

  “Oh!…R-right.” Nodding sharply, Haruyuki realized with a start a single preposterous fact. “Uh…um.”

  “Hm?”

  “I…I…Your real name…I don’t…know it…”

  Snap.

  The world froze again almost like when he was accelerated—no, harder and thicker than that.

  But Kuroyukihime’s laughter mixed with a sigh melted it soon enough. “You…I thought you looked in my agenda?”

  “Oh! I…I just glanced in it once, at the start…”

  “Ha-ha. Of course. That’s very you, Haruyuki. Well then, let’s introduce ourselves anew, shall we? That said, it’s not that different from my nickname.”

  A gentle breeze blew in through the slightly open window, gently diffusing the scent of the black lotus. Stretching her thin body up straight, she clasped both hands in front of her chest.

  The beautiful older student and rebel Black King said in a clear voice, “My name is…”

  END

  AFTERWORD

  I’m not sure when it started exactly, but whenever I’m faced with something, I always end up preparing for di
sappointment and discouragement.

  Always expecting and preparing for the worst is not such a great thing as all that. The only thing is that if you give up right from the start, you at least can get away with using less energy when you do really end up failing.

  When I started writing this story in October 2007, I was pretty sure I wasn’t actually going to finish it or anything. And when I did finish it, I was convinced I wouldn’t get all the deletions and revisions done to meet the guidelines of the Dengeki Prize. I continued to tell myself, as a matter of course, even after I sent my submission in, that there was no way I was going to make it through all the stages of judging.

  Thus, on the occasion of winning the prize and being published, I was obviously not prepared to do things like write an afterword like this, and as of this moment, I am still at a total loss. I want to write something rich with brilliant insight and style, along with a wafting of sad pathos in the midst of vital humor, but since not one of these things is popping into my head, I’ll simply write down what I’m feeling at this point in time.

  For me, it’s already a miracle that I managed to write this story.

  Because as I write this afterword for the pocket book edition, an extension of the writing of the story, I can’t even guess at how minuscule the likelihood that it would have become a reality.

  Haruyuki, the protagonist of Accel World, is also someone who tries not to hope for too much. But where he is decisively different from me is that Haruyuki will squeeze out every last drop of energy he has to keep running away. He’s incredibly dedicated to his pessimism.

  This is just my thinking, but whatever trajectory it might take, as long as you at least have the energy, something is bound to happen at some point. Haruyuki’s dedication can’t be beat, but if there is a reason I won this prize other than miracles and luck, I think it might be the meager energy I stored up being pessimistic.

  For my rough manuscript submission to become a proper book like this, I was honored to have the invaluable assistance of so many people.

  Minoru Kawakami, not only for taking time out of his busy schedule to write the commentary, but also for his many suggestions for important parts of the action scenes. The Accel World: Kawakami Edition he wrote for this book is one of my most cherished treasures.

  Hima, who drew so wonderfully my protagonist whose visualization I had expected to be fraught with difficulty. The other characters, too, are so vibrant that I almost think that this is how they always were; my own image of them has changed.

  My supervising editor, Kazuma Miki, who always gave me guidance with such patience and careful kindness when I definitely could not be said to be obedient, despite the fact that I was a newbie who didn’t know left from right. If I can always have this fountain of editorial power with me, I will continue to tap away at these keys with everything I’ve got.

  And the many people who have been supporting me these last seven years on the global net. It was precisely because of all of your support that I am here now.

  Finally, my greatest gratitude to you for reading this far. Thank you so much.

  November 28, 2008

  Reki Kawahara

  Well, hello there, ladies and gentlemen! My name is Kawakami; I’m a second-year junior high school student with a duel avatar called “White Turnip.” I have an old-looking face, and there are times when I seem to be more than thirty, and a little girl who sat in front of me on the train uttered the terrible words, “Mama, it’s a murderer,” but I am, in fact, a junior high student.

  Like all of you, I’m also just another Burst Linker, but I’m not anything close to a fight freak like you. Things like that, that’s the realm of children—Eep, sorry. I said too much. Let’s see, to go back to who I am; I’m a programmer working to create improvement mods for Burst Linking.

  For the Brain Burst world, a programmer like me is only there to provide elements of abundance or of bad health. But as long as we don’t put together various types of the latter or as long as these combinations don’t leak if they are put together, programmers are basically protected from every faction as contributors to the Brain Burst world. Which is to say, we’re exempt from Duels and protected from unfair Duels. And if we’re taken in by a faction, we get the burst points of those punished, so we level up quickly.

  I also work under the patronage of a certain faction, but I make programs that are shared by all Burst Linkers. With the programs I make, first of all, the faction I belong to buys it with burst points, and then the faction’s Blocker sells it to people in the Duel Gallery, in effect making the program a faction asset. There’s competition and the commotion of changing teams for programmers like myself, and life gets quite busy, even though we essentially have an indoor job.

  And now I’m making—you could almost call it my specialty at this point—a forwarder to send information from meatspace to an avatar in the Burst Link world. This forwarder will tell you what meatspace you is sensing and feeling while you are in the Brain Burst world, compressed a thousandfold.

  …You say we don’t really need something like that? That you’re sped up over a thousand times, so even if you don’t go back and check on your body, it’s less than two seconds anyway?

  I wonder. One: Let me first talk about something only the guys will understand.

  Okay?

  It takes point-three seconds for your mother to open the door behind you and come into your room.

  Get it?

  If you’re watching porn videos or in the middle of playing an erotic game, and you end up wanting to Burst Link because that stuff is just not getting you hard enough and you need more, and this slight return time lag might leave a stain on the memory of your boyhood years…When you think of it like that, the alarm to warn you that your mother’s in the room (abbreviated to “mother room”) in the forwarder I’m making becomes an essential item.

  Oh, I don’t know about women. Hmm, that’s one unknown set of unknowns to work out.

  However, currently, we’ve moved past version seven, and we only take burst points at updates, but I suppose this, too, is the style of a long unbroken line of programmers. My grandfather was an erotic-game programmer from the eight-bit era; he apparently fired a barrage of empty dialogue into the empty sky even as he was dying. He really was a model man. Although it’s a mystery as to how he ever got married.

  And then the grandson of this remarkable man, me, also developed a taste for the X-rated games at the age of thirteen, and now I spend my days in the real world earning small change by unlocking the hardware on my friends’ Neurolinkers and making them region free. Heh-heh-heh, you guys, the text in the erotic games you all are playing now is a remake of the hot text my grandpa came up with sixty years ago. But Grandpa had Beast attributes. Can’t fight your blood. Oh, but I do wonder what kind of impressions he would’ve had if Grandpa had managed to live to the present day and age. No, forget it. I mean, Grandpa was a 2-D kind of guy, a world where polygons are useless. The one time I brought it up, we got into a fight in the bath. You can’t push your values on a kid. You gotta leave it to genetics.

  In any case, I’m now testing version eight of the current program, and I seem to be plunging into some incredible areas as I do. I’ve come to understand the Brain Burst system, and I’m finally able to not just raise an alarm with the information from meatspace, but to forward the actual experience itself.

  It may be stretched out a thousand times, but you can bring your five senses from the real world over to this side. You probably think there’s no point in this. Because when you stretch out sound or whatever a thousand times, it simply gets stretched out, and that’s that.

  But right now, the truth is, meatspace me is in the middle of dinner. And I’m testing version eight.

  Do you get what I mean?

  Exactly. In my meatspace mouth right now is curry on a spoon.

  Right, you get it, don’t you?

  My mouth is already closed, and the heat of the curry is
pressed up against the roof of my mouth; the soft grains of rice are spilling over onto my tongue; the spicy sweetness slipping up my nose is the very essence of the Vermont curry. Medium-spicy for a junior high student…!

  Because this is prolonged a thousand times, the heat of this spoonful of curry and rice will continue to sit in my mouth and on my teeth for thirty minutes. For the next thirty minutes, whatever I do, whether I go for a walk, look up at the sky, look down, sit in the Gallery, get in a Duel, go to sleep, the curry will be with me the whole time!

  How about that?

  Even if you were to lose a Duel, if you had curry the whole thirty minutes, don’t you think you’d be glad you leapt into this Burst world?!

  However…when you return to meatspace, you eat the rest! That is the curry that is a thousand times plus one!

  But! But it doesn’t stop there. Human beings have more darkness in them than that.

  Yes. If you get the timing right in meatspace, you can make every pleasure continue a thousand times longer in the Burst world.

  Whoa.

  Get it? Taking things simply in the erotic direction is a junior high–level reaction, isn’t it? Oh, I’m a junior high student, so I already did that. No, i-it’s a test, okay? A test! A test!! Well, I did give a midterm exam to my erotic-game partner in my house, but apparently, after crying out sharply in a strange voice for about five minutes on the floor of the other world, there was some kind of feedback in my flesh-and-blood body and meatspace me had a heart attack and nearly died. On the Burst side, too, you are utterly defenseless faced with your male destiny because you are completely impotent at fighting.

  But that was a close one. I’d be in serious trouble if I died and the parent who found me at the scene misunderstood. Father, Mother, your son is not the kind of man who would die playing older-sister-type erotic games. That is precisely because he is one thousand times faster. If it was the blond, big-tit type, I’d probably die at five times.

  Which is why that time the “winged one” that everyone’s talking about who somehow managed to start up a Duel with me was apparently looking for me and loitering around outside, but he would never even dream I was in my house, tossing my head back, pounding away, happily crying out, “Eeeaaah! Kawakami sweat’s comiiiiiiing!” throwing away my life and my caste. I don’t want to think about it, either.