Kuroyukihime’s Return

  The shadows huddled together as if discussing something. Unconsciously, Haruyuki strained his ears.

  “…too, but he looks like the jumpy type.”

  “And I don’t have his name in memory. Maybe a newbie?”

  “But he’s metallic. That’s gotta mean something.”

  They’re—They’re not NPCs. Haruyuki felt it instinctively. Their demeanor, their tone—he was sure they weren’t the creation of some program; they were real, live people. But this was the accelerated virtual net. Which meant they had also installed Brain Burst, just like Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime.

  In which case, they probably knew what this was all about. I’ll just go and ask them, Haruyuki thought, and he stepped nervously into the road, advancing to the white center line. Abruptly, he felt a new pair of eyes on him. He stopped moving and ran his gaze quickly over the scene.

  There they were. Never mind the group of three down there. He didn’t know where they had appeared from, but on the roofs of the abandoned buildings, on top of piles of bricks, strange silhouettes were staring down at Haruyuki from all directions. However, they didn’t come any closer, and…they seemed to be waiting for something.

  At a loss, Haruyuki, in the middle of the road, shifted just his gaze. In seemingly no time, the count in the top of his field of view had gotten down to 1620. There was no change in the two bars stretching out to the right and left of the numbers. And he hadn’t noticed until now, but underneath the bars were small English letters.

  The text on the left side read SILVER CROW, and on the right was ASH ROLLER.

  I know this screen configuration. I totally know this screen, Haruyuki thought, hit by a powerful sense of déjà vu.

  It wasn’t anything new. This kind of game program had swept through the arcades of Japan more than thirty years before Haruyuki was born, at the end of the 1900s. And just recently, too, he felt like he had seen something like this. It was—

  Standing stock-still, searching his memory, he jumped at the sound of a sudden explosion behind him. He tried to turn around, lost his balance, and fell on his backside with a thump. A remarkably large silhouette towered above him.

  A motorcycle. And not the motor-drive type he was used to seeing. It was saddled with something like the guts of the internal combustion engines that had been outlawed ages ago, and those guts were roaring and rumbling. The front fork was ridiculously long, and the tire wedged between it was also so thick as to be a joke. A faint burning scent wafted up from the rough gray treads.

  Haruyuki turned his eyes upward and timidly took in the rider straddling the leather seat on the other side of the exaggeratedly bent handle bars. Body encased in studded black leather, boots on each firmly planted foot, arms crossed over the chest. His head was tucked inside a helmet, also black, but the visor was a flashy thing with a skeleton design.

  Haruyuki listened, dumbstruck at the creaking voice coming from within. “The Century End stage! It’s been forever. Alllllll riiiiiiiight!” From one of the folded arms, an index finger popped up into the air and waggled left to right. “And as a special bonus, my opponent is a shiny newb. Super all riiiiiiiight!”

  Bringing up his right boot, the skeleton rider laid it on the handle bar and rubbed it dexterously. As he did, a thunderous, booming roar sent Haruyuki flying once more.

  No matter which way he looked at it, this guy didn’t seem brimming with warm friendlies. More importantly, if Haruyki’s memory served, this was a battle stage. So then this rider was…

  “Wh-whoa…” Haruyuki retreated slowly and turned around. “Whoaaaaa!” He started running in earnest, thin robot legs clanking.

  Behind him, the engine roared once again, and the sound of the tires squealing against the pavement threatened to pierce his eardrums. A mere second later, he felt an incredible impact and a sharp pain in the middle of his back before he was flying high up into the night sky. At the same time, the blue SILVER CROW bar in the top right of his view shrank abruptly.

  Spinning around in space, Haruyuki thought, I knew it. So then this is a fighting game, I’m a newbie who doesn’t know his left from his right, and my opponent is a veteran player who figured that out five minutes ago.

  There’s no way I’m going to win.

  “Ha-ha-ha! So you’re already being hunted? That’s because you broke your promise to me, boy.”

  Lunch break.

  Kuroyukihime, directly connected to Haruyuki in the lounge again just like the day before, laughed smoothly at the mere thought, shaking her head, bandaged under her bangs to encourage healing. Although awful to look at because of the bleeding, her injury was apparently nothing more than a cut. She had stopped every word of gratitude and apology he had in his vocabulary with a wave of her right hand.

  “I-it’s not funny. I thought I was going to die. I mean, I know it’s my fault for accidentally connecting to the global net, but…”

  Watching with amusement as Haruyuki stuttered, Kuroyukihime lifted her teacup from the table and brought it to her lips. Next to the saucer was a shrimp gratin with steam rising from it, untouched just like the large plate of pork curry in front of Haruyuki.

  The student council members sitting at the table with them had already begun moving their chopsticks and spoons, and Haruyuki’s stomach made a slight, pathetic sound. However, Kuroyukihime’s lecture or explanation or whatever it was didn’t seem like it was likely to end anytime soon.

  “But, well, I suppose it’s saved me the trouble of having to explain it all to you. The cost of the lesson was somewhat high, but you do understand now, yes?”

  “Understand…what?”

  “The truth about the Brain Burst program. It’s no sweeping conspiracy or mystery, it’s just—”

  Haruyuki nodded sharply and mentally articulated the end of Kuroyukihime’s cutoff sentence. “It’s just a fighting game. Encounters using the real world as a stage. It’s crazy.”

  “Ha-ha, it certainly is quite crazy, something to really make people talk.”

  “I mean, think about what you could do with this amazing of acceleration technology! And you go with a fighter?! The genre was already obsolete thirty years ago!”

  At this, Kuroyukihime tilted her head slightly as if thinking, a sarcastic-looking smile slipping out from somewhere. “Hmm, I think you need to phrase it slightly differently. Better to say that we Burst Linkers are accelerated to play fighting games. Conversely, we fight so that we can continue to be accelerated. We must. This is the one unpleasant part of this program.”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “Mm…I should probably explain the rest to you in the field. Go ahead and accelerate.”

  “O-okay…”

  Haruyuki let go of his unfinished business with the large plate of curry in front of him and shouted the “acceleration” command as instructed after straightening up on his chair.

  “Burst link!”

  A clang slapped his body and his consciousness, and the students around him stopped moving instantly. At the same time, all color vanished, only to be replaced with that transparent blue.

  Kuroyukihime in front of him was also static, but her avatar in its bewitching black dress soon stepped out of her neat, uniformed figure, a soul escaping the body. Haruyuki slipped off his chair in his pink pig body and stepped forward so that he wouldn’t have to see the rotund real-life self he was leaving behind.

  “So…what are we doing?”

  “You have a new icon in the left of your field of vision, yes?”

  Shifting his gaze as instructed, he realized that there was, in fact, now a burning B mark among the app start-up icons lined up there. He raised his left hand and clicked on it.

  “That’s the menu for the fighting game software Brain Burst. You can see your own status and battle results and look for Burst Linkers around you to challenge them. Try pressing the DUELING button.”

  Nodding, Haruyuki clicked the bottom-most button on the menu. Immediately, a new window opened,
and after a momentary search display, a list of names appeared.

  That said, there were only two names on it. Silver Crow, the name he had seen that morning, which probably referred to Haruyuki himself, and one more. Black Lotus.

  He had absolutely no doubt that this was Kuroyukihime’s Burst Linker name, but he lifted his head briefly to confirm. As expected, the black swallowtail avatar nodded lightly.

  “Right now, because we’re cut off from the global net and only connected to the school’s local net, there’s just you and me on the list. Or at least there should just be us.”

  “Yes…Black Lotus.” He wanted to say something like What a pretty name or It suits you perfectly, but, of course, there was no way lines like that would flow out of his mouth all smooth and cool. Haruyuki’s pig nose simply twitched.

  “All right, then. Now click on my name and ask to fight me.”

  “Wh-what?!”

  “I’m not saying we’re going to fight for real. We’ll just let the time run out and end in a draw.” With a faintly wry smile, Kuroyukihime made a small, encouraging noise.

  Haruyuki lightly clicked her name on the list, all the while wondering at the fact that here he was playing one-on-one in a day and age when massive battle games with tens of thousands of people connecting on the same field were not uncommon. He selected DUEL from the pop-up menu that appeared and subsequently YES from the YES/NO dialogue that followed.

  In an instant, the world changed again.

  All the students disappeared instantly from the frozen blue lounge. Color returned to the pillars and tables, which decayed as if weathered, and a thick layer of dust clung to the windows. The sky was dyed a deep orange, and a dry wind blew up from somewhere, stirring grasses he didn’t know the names of sprouting up from the floor.

  The familiar 1800 was carved out in the top of his line of sight. Blue bars stretched out on both sides, followed finally by the flaming text FIGHT!!

  “Hmm…a Twilight stage? You pulled a rare one.” Kuroyukihime’s voice echoed beside Haruyuki, whose eyeballs rolled in his head as he took in the scene. “The properties of this stage are burns well, collapses soon, and unexpectedly dark.”

  “U-uh-huh…” Nodding, Haruyuki took a look at his body and saw that at some point, his pink pig frame had transformed into the thin silver robot. He shifted his gaze, wondering what form Kuroyukihime had taken, but standing before him was the same black dress avatar, not even slightly altered.

  “That’s your duel avatar, hm? Silver Crow, good name. Good color. I like the form, too.” Kuroyukihime’s hand stretched out to stroke the smooth silver head.

  The definite sensation of being touched made Haruyuki realize all over again that this was a real virtual reality, a place where the childish no-touching code—ostensibly for protection—did not exist.

  “Th-thanks. It’s kind of wimpy, but I can’t redo it. Right? So who came up with the design and the name? But wait—duel avatar?”

  “Just like the name, an avatar for fighting. The design is by the Brain Burst program and you yourself. Last night, you had a very long, scary dream, didn’t you?”

  “…I did.” He couldn’t remember the details, just intuitively felt that it was an incredible nightmare. Unconsciously, he rubbed his thin robot arms with his hard palms.

  “That was because the program was accessing your deep images. Brain Burst carves up and filters the player’s desires, fears, and obsessions to compose your duel avatar.”

  “My…images. Fears and…desires,” Haruyuki mumbled, looking down at his body again. “This…this tiny, weak, smooth body is what I wished for? I mean sure, it’s true I’m always thinking it’d be better if I lost some weight…even so, a little more hero-like—”

  “Ha-ha-ha! It’s not as simple as that. What the program reads is not your ideal image but your feelings of inferiority. In your case, you should probably just count yourself lucky you didn’t end up with that pink pig as is as your duel avatar. Although I like that one, too.”

  “P-please don’t say that. I hate it.” He quickly considered putting together a new black knight avatar for the school’s local net as he asked, “But then does that mean that Brain Burst also made your school avatar? That’s the image of your inferiority complex? But it’s so beautiful…”

  “No.” Eyes darkening slightly, Kuroyukihime lowered her face. “This is one I put together myself with an editor. I…For my own reasons, I’ve sealed off my actual duel avatar. I’ll tell you the reason one of these days, when the time comes.”

  “Sealed…?”

  “Unfortunately, my duel avatar is ugly. The epitome of hideous. Although that’s not the reason I’ve sealed it away…Anyway, enough about me.”

  Kuroyukihime shrugged, and her face quickly found its usual mysterious expression. She petted Haruyuki’s helmet head once again with a pale hand. “This morning you were thrust into a fight with another Burst Linker through the global net. You fought with this brand-new avatar. And you were thoroughly defeated. Correct?”

  “Uh, well, pretty much. He crushed me.” Haruyuki reluctantly remembered the fight stage he had been abruptly pulled into before school. He had been smashed, rammed, and sent flying by the rude rider in the skeleton helmet straddling the bike in the dark ruins, and his health gauge had dropped to nothing in the blink of an eye.

  Together with a pathetic sound effect, the text YOU LOSE had appeared in front of him, and then…“I’m pretty sure…It showed my name and level one, and then some weird number. Burst…points, I think? That went from ninety-nine to eighty-nine.”

  “Good, it’s good you remembered. Burst points! Those are the very things that send us into this merciless battlefield.” Nearly shouting, Kuroyukihime took a few steps toward the window and whirled around. She thrust the parasol she held in both hands down onto the floor with a sharp snap, and a small shard of the cracked pavement flew off. “Burst points are, simply put, the number of times we can accelerate. Accelerate one time, lose one point. The initial value immediately after installation is one hundred, but because you accelerated once in the lounge yesterday, you used up a point. And then you ended up using another point earlier.”

  “Gah…s-so how do we pay for them? Are we actually charged real money?”

  “No,” Kuroyukihime countered crisply. “There’s only one way to increase your burst points: win Duels. If you win, your points go up ten for a same-level battle. However, your points drop ten if you lose. Like you did this morning.”

  Turning her face sharply to the twilight sky on the other side of the window, Kuroyukihime continued, almost murmuring. “Acceleration is extremely powerful. It goes without saying that winning fights means earning a perfect score on a test or winning big at certain types of gambling or sports becomes child’s play. The freshman player who broke the record for home runs at the big Koshien tournament this summer was a high-level Burst Linker.”

  “Wh—”

  “Therefore.” She cast the baffled Haruyuki a somehow sad glance. “Once we’ve tasted this forbidden nectar, we have no choice but to keep accelerating forever. And to earn the burst points that permit us to do so, we have no choice but to keep fighting forever.”

  “J-just wait a minute.” That talented heavy hitter was a Burst Linker? No, that’s not the issue. Isn’t there something off about Kuroyukihime’s story? Haruyuki thought hard and then opened his mouth. “Uh…um, before, you said if you win in a Duel, you get ten points, and if you lose, you drop ten points, right? Then that means…since you use points accelerating, the points all Burst Linkers share only go down. So people who aren’t good at fighting naturally lose all their points…What happens then?”

  “You really do catch on quickly. It’s simple. You lose Brain Burst.” Her dark eyes almost burning, Kuroyukihime stared directly at Haruyuki. “The program is automatically uninstalled and can never be reinstalled. There’s no point in changing Neurolinker models, either. It recognizes you by your unique brain waves. Pe
ople who have lost all their points can never accelerate again.” After relaying this in a bleak tone, she added, “Although it’s not the case that the total pool only diminishes because new people join in the fight, like you. That said, right now, the trend is a slight decline.”

  But Haruyuki barely heard this last part. “You lose…Brain Burst.”

  Even though he had only tasted the power of acceleration two or three times, his back seized up at the mere thought. And it wasn’t just that he wouldn’t be able to accelerate. For Haruyuki, there was also the fact that he would lose his one point of contact with Kuroyukihime, who lived in a totally separate world. Once again, he felt the weight of those ten points taken from him by that skull rider.

  “Now then. What are you going to do, Haruyuki?”

  Faced with this nearly whispered question, Haruyuki lifted his head. “What do you mean?”

  “At this point, you can still go back. To the regular world, without acceleration or fighting. You won’t see those idiots who were bullying again, I guarantee it as a student council member.”

  “I—I…” I don’t care about acceleration or Brain Burst or whatever. I just don’t want to be away from you. Of course, he couldn’t say anything like that. Instead, he clenched his silver fist and replied, “I still have to repay you.”

  “Oh?”

  “You gave me Brain Burst and pulled me out of that hell. I can at least see that you didn’t do it to steal my initial hundred points. If you had, you could’ve told me anything; you had millions of options. So there must be something you want me to do. Some objective that was worth taking the time to check my squash game score and lecture me from square one about acceleration. Am I right?”

  “Hmm. An astute inference.”

  Through his silver mask, Haruyuki stared squarely at the beautiful avatar with her faint smile. “I…I’m actually not the type of person who gets to talk to you like this. I’m not cool. I’m a blob, a crybaby, I hold grudges, I get jealous of the only two friends I have, I run away at the drop of a hat. I really am a waste of skin. I’m basically the worst.”