The Red Crest

  In addition to Mode I, which restored Chocolat’s special-attack gauge in the opening stages of the fight, Lime Bell’s special attack Citron Call had a Mode II, which used up her entire gauge. Its effect was to cancel out up to four levels in the status of the target avatar. Specifically, it made it as though things like an avatar losing its limb—or being parasitized by an object, or equipping or obtaining of Enhanced Armament—had never happened.

  Since the ISS kit was, in fact, a parasitic object and was also the obtaining of an Enhanced Armament, the group assumed cancellation with Mode II would be effective. However, a week earlier, Takumu, parasitized with a kit himself, had asserted that this method would not make his own kit disappear. Because the kit activated a sort of pseudo-Incarnate system with the desire for power in the heart of the user as its energy source, it could overwrite Citron Call.

  In which case, it would seem that theoretically, they shouldn’t be about to get rid of Mint and Plum’s kits now, either, but there was just one decisive difference here than from Takumu’s case. And that was the fact that Mint and Plum had had their bodies cut open by Magenta Scissor and been forcefully parasitized with their kits. They had said words earlier to the effect that they wanted power, but that was not a feeling generated by their own hearts; it was something poured into them by other kit users through the nightly parallel processing. In which case, if they had inside them a resistance to the kit—no, a love for Chocolat—then there was a possibility that Citron Call could cancel the parasitization.

  “P-please!!” Chiyuri shouted in a thin voice, as she continued the technique.

  “Go away!!” Haruyuki also prayed intently, squeezing the words out as he held Chiyuri’s shoulders. If their plan failed, then either Chocolat would be killed or she would use the Judgment Blow on her friends before that happened.

  But he didn’t want to see that outcome again. Absolutely not.

  In the pale-green light, the ISS kits attached to the chests of Mint and Plum shot out a flash the color of blood in its resistance. The eyeballs swelled up enormously, the blood vessels entwining them throbbing fiercely.

  And then the right arms of the two girls, still up in the air, slowly started to come back down. The dark, miasma-like aura had basically disappeared. Their fists were released, and thin fingers reached out to Chocolat, trembling.

  “Min-Min! Pliko!” Chocolat shouted, taking up both their hands to clutch.

  A moment later, the black blood vessels extending from the ISS kits dried up, and the eyeball weakly closed its lids. The parasite turned into black mist and evaporated in verdurous light. When Citron Call was finished, there were no objects on the chests of Mint Mitten or Plum Flipper.

  Chiyuri crumpled, and Haruyuki held her up, his eyes open intently wide. When he’d crushed the ISS kit that had parasitized the Burst Linker Olive Grab, a ball of red light had flown off into the sky. But this time, there was no mistake; nothing had escaped. That could mean only one thing: Their strategy worked—the existence of the kits had been rewound, and they had disappeared completely.

  “You did it. You did it, Bell!” Haruyuki clenched his left hand, and Chiyuri, in his right arm, lifted her face and grinned through her exhaustion.

  Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper had lost consciousness temporarily, and Chocolat was also leaning against them, eyes closed.

  As Haruyuki and Chiyuri started walking toward them, the chocolate-colored avatar lifted her hanging head. There were streaks of white light on her smooth cheeks.

  “In the end, when I held their hands…I could heard their voices. ‘Cocoa, we’re sorry,’ they said…,” she murmured hoarsely.

  “Yeah, they’re okay now.” Haruyuki nodded deeply, together with Chiyuri. “They should be back to their old selves.”

  “You really fought hard, huh?” Chiyuri said. “It’s because your feelings reached them, Choco, that I could make the kits disappear.”

  The girl nodded sharply and paused a second before speaking again. “You can both call me ‘Cocoa,’ too.”

  Unwittingly, Haruyuki smiled wryly at this sign that Chocolat was quickly getting back up to full speed. But this was soon followed by “However, I will not let you taste me again.”

  He stiffened immediately.

  “What?” Chiyuri cocked her head, and Chocolat started to open her mouth to expose Haruyuki’s deed.

  Before she could, they heard a sharp cry of krrrrrr from a slight ways off. At this warning, Haruyuki reflexively whirled his eyes around.

  A slender silhouette jumped into his view, approaching slowly from the west. He braced himself, but soon relaxed. Magenta Scissor had her greatest weapon, the enormous scissors, split into two once more, and those pieces were dangling from her sides. Naturally, she was still equipped with an ISS kit, so a long-distance attack with Dark Shot was a possibility. But she didn’t look like she had it in her now. Her left arm was missing, having been severed by Haruyuki’s light sword, and her right arm held a brown ball about thirty centimeters in diameter—the seed of Avocado Avoider.

  “Cho— I mean, Cocoa, don’t let Coolu attack. She’s probably not here to fight,” Haruyuki said, quietly.

  Chocolat nodded, albeit with a worried look on her face. She raised her right hand toward Carbuncle on the east side of the grounds, and with just that, the Enemy obediently lay down.

  “Wow. Well trained,” Chiyuri murmured admiringly. She also seemed to feel that the battle was over, but even still, she joined Haruyuki in stepping out in front of Chocolat and her friends to wait for the reddish-purple avatar.

  Magenta Scissor came fairly close before stopping. Silver Crow was covered in injuries, cut with scissors and burned by Coolu’s laser, but their fuchsia enemy was much the same. Her ribbon armor was smashed all over, leaving a fair amount of her actual body exposed. Above all, she should still have been hurting from having her arm cut off. However, not only did none of that show on her face, but the tall F-type avatar smiled faintly.

  “I was plenty surprised just at you bending the Enemy’s laser and melting Avocado’s armor, but then you go even further and get rid of the ISS kits, huh? Just like that girl’s subordinates, I suppose.”

  “Do you know the Black King?” Haruyuki asked.

  Her sharp shoulders bobbed up and down. “At the very least, I don’t want to have any more to do with you lot lest she herself appear…is about the extent of my knowing her.”

  “If you’re saying that, then you’re not going to come at Cocoa and her friends anymore, right?” Chiyuri pressed.

  Magenta smiled again. “It’s annoying, but I don’t really have a choice. If I do parasitize them again, you’ll just make it disappear, after all. I’m giving up on the north and moving east.”

  These words were a declaration that, even if she did temporarily abandon the idea of recruiting Chocolat and her friends, she had not given up on her larger, true objective—spreading the ISS kits to the whole of the Accelerated World. Haruyuki was about to ask why she would go that far and then gave up on the idea. He had already heard her motives—that she was going to remove inequalities caused by differences in abilities and appearances from the Accelerated World.

  Tightly gritting his teeth beneath his mirrored goggles, Haruyuki turned his gaze to the brown, ball-shaped avatar in Magenta Scissor’s arm. He had a hard time believing that the small sphere was the true form of Avocado Avoider, that massive avatar, two and a half or more meters tall. But the short arms and legs and the beady eye lenses shared the same design as his original appearance. And a shrunken ISS kit was attached to him in a place that corresponded to the chest.

  “So then it’s on, huh?” Haruyuki said, swallowing back all kinds of feelings. “Are you going to achieve your goal first, or will we destroy the ISS kit main body first?”

  “I didn’t expect this kind of trash talk from you. It’s weird.” Magenta smiled more broadly than she had so far. “Okay, fine, let’s say it’s on. But first. You all won here today, s
o I have to give you your prize, hmm?”

  She snapped out two fingers of the hand holding Avocado, and two rectangular shapes were suddenly embedded in between them, although Haruyuki had no idea where she’d pulled them from. He was more than familiar with card items, but these were a matte black. This was the first time he’d seen them in this color. It looked like the item name was inscribed on the front in a crimson-red font.

  “These are the ISS kits cut out of Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper. They came back to my storage, but the data might be contaminated, you know…by considerateness or kindness. I have no use for them, so I’ll leave it to you all to dispose of them,” she said, her tone making it impossible for him to grasp her true intent. She flicked her fingers, and the two cards spun through the air to plunge to the tile at Haruyuki’s feet.

  “D-dispose…I mean…” He twisted his neck as he wondered to himself if they were burnable or nonburnable garbage.

  “Do whatever you want with them.” Magenta shrugged once more. “Boil them, fry them, analyze them…Hmm? Oh, right! And tell Cyan Pile. That when I said I was giving it to him in that form because I liked him when I gave him the kit card last week, I was serious.”

  “Hey!” the so-far-silent Chiyuri snapped to attention and shouted the instant she heard this. “Wh-why should we give him a message like that?! More importantly, why do you like Pile?!”

  “Goodness! Well, he is wonderful, isn’t he? That asymmetrical form…Oh my, now that I’m thinking of it, you’re quite nice as well, hmm?” Magenta retorted coolly, and as an added bonus, flashed Lime Bell a bewitching smile.

  This apparently was impossible for even Chiyuri to process immediately, and Magenta’s smile deepened momentarily at the other girl’s frozen form before she wordlessly turned on her heel. Resettling Avocado’s seed in her arms, she walked toward Sakurajosui Station.

  Staring after her, Haruyuki was taken by a brief conflict. Magenta Scissor would likely keep disseminating the ISS kits in the Accelerated World. If he was going to try to stop her, maybe he should attack her here, defeat her, and then defeat her again when she regenerated in an hour, continuing to kill her and force her into total point loss. With the difference in their current battle abilities, it was definitely possible.

  However, Magenta also had to know that Haruyuki and his comrades had that option. If, at the point in time when Mint and Plum’s ISS kits were purified, she had instantly withdrawn to a leave point, she probably could have removed the danger of successive kills.

  But rather than doing that, she had walked over to exchange words with Haruyuki and Chiyuri. He found it hard to believe that she had intended to set some malicious trap, including the gifting of the two cards to them. Most likely, Magenta had dared to stay on the battleground as the loser for the sake of her own pride—pride she still had even after playing host to an ISS kit.

  Haruyuki couldn’t attack an opponent like that from behind. He took his eyes off the receding shadow and crouched down to pick up the black cards at his feet.

  “I-is it okay to touch them?” Chiyuri asked, in a worried voice.

  “I guess maybe it’s okay as long as I don’t press the ‘use’ button or shout the activation command or anything.” Even as he said this, he was reluctant to hold them for a long period of time, so he quickly opened his Instruct menu, moved to his storage screen, and tucked the two cards away there. When he lifted his head, job finished, the figure of Magenta Scissor was already gone from the large grounds.

  Clenching his teeth against the complex mix of emotions that he himself didn’t really understand upwelling in his chest, Haruyuki turned around. In the arms of the kneeling Chocolat, the two girl avatars were just starting to wake from their slumber; their slender limbs trembled.

  Haruyuki moved to approach them, but Chiyuri grabbed his arm.

  “Let’s just leave the three of them to themselves,” she whispered, and he nodded in agreement.

  He couldn’t hear their exchange, but Chocolat Puppeteer, Mint Mitten, and Plum Flipper appeared to be talking slowly. After the passage of some time, brown and green and purple arms were stretched out, and the three girls hugged one another tightly. Captivated by this beautiful scene, Haruyuki snapped back to reality when a massive shadow entered the frame suddenly from the left. The shadow turned out to be an Enemy with short limbs extending from an armadillo-like body wrapped in armor, an elliptical ruby glittering on its forehead—Coolu.

  Chocolat had ordered it to stand down, but it probably couldn’t hold on any longer. It rubbed its streamlined head against the girls, a sweet voice slipping out of it. Krrr, krrrr.

  At some point, Haruyuki had grabbed Chiyuri’s hand beside him, and they watched over the three girls and one creature that made up the Legion Petit Paquet. They had originally come to the Setagaya area with the sole goal of special training with an Enemy opponent and had then gotten dragged into an unplanned, fierce battle that had started with an unexpected encounter. But from the bottom of his heart, Haruyuki was glad that they had visited that place at that time on that day.

  Chiyuri appeared to feel the exact same way; her slightly teary voice reached his ears. “Thank goodness.”

  It felt like they had been accelerated for a fairly long time, but when they returned to the real world via a portal, only the seconds displayed on the clock in the lower left of his virtual desktop had changed.

  From the faint crack under the door, the tantalizing scent of sweet-and-sour pork with pineapples wafted in, but it was still nearly ten minutes until the six-thirty suppertime. Even though he was starving from all that flying and waiting and fighting! But no matter what kind of Burst Linker you were, you still couldn’t fast-forward time. Body still flat on the mattress that was a little softer than his own bed, Haruyuki let out a long sigh.

  “C’mon, Haru. There’s no need to be crying on this side.”

  He heard Chiyuri’s voice from his immediate left and reflexively turned his face in that direction. When he did, a mysterious fluid that had indeed built up in both his eyes spilled out and cut across his cheek to make a light stain on the sheets.

  “I-I’m not crying!” Trying out a protest like an elementary school kid, he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. But perhaps the tear-gland bubble was broken; the droplets welled up one after another and slid along his cheek. He gave up on interrupting them and tried to turn his back to Chiyuri. And then he noticed that Chiyuri’s face, twisted through the film of fluid, was also shining with little drops of light.

  “I mean, you’re crying, aren’t you?” he asked, pursing his lips.

  “It’s just”—Chiyuri didn’t try to hide her tears, but rather smiled through them—“I mean, like, I’m just about the same amount of happy and sad. A double dose. I can’t help it.”

  “Well, if it’s a double dose, I guess you can’t, huh…” Agreeing with this curious logic, Haruyuki thought, Oh, that’s it.

  After he had seen Magenta Scissor and Avocado Avoider off, a major ingredient in the mix of feelings that had risen up in his chest was “sadness.”

  Why was he sad? Because he thought they could also have a different future.

  “Why—?” Turning his face to the ceiling once more, Haruyuki squeezed his voice out from his nearly blocked throat. “Why do we have to fight like that…?”

  If the duels that took place in the Normal Duel Field were a fighting game in which opponents pitted their knowledge, technique, and willpower against each other, then the Incarnate battles in the Unlimited Neutral Field were life-and-death conflicts, with rage and hatred alone slamming up against each other.

  It had only been eight months since he became a Burst Linker, and Haruyuki had just finally reached level five, but he had been put in that position several times already. None of those fights had given him a shred of the excitement and fun of the duel, though. The fierce battle with Magenta Scissor that day was the same. He had found the opening in the Dark Blow she relied on and launched his La
ser Sword to win with difficulty, but all that was left in his chest was a deep despair.

  “If we hadn’t treated Setagaya like an empty area and had gone to hang out there more…If we had met just as Burst Linkers, all of us, and dueled normally, I’m sure that—”

  We could’ve been friends with them, too. He swallowed this part back and moved to turn over onto his stomach on the bed, when Chiyuri grabbed his shoulder tightly.

  “It’s…It’s not over yet, Haru. We’re going to get rid of all the ISS kits in the Accelerated World, and then we’ll go see Magenta and Avocado again. Next time, we’ll invite Taku and Kuroyuki and our sister Fuko and little Ui, too, right? And then…And then…”

  “Yeah. We will.” Haruyuki nodded, wiping at his face with his right arm, and this time, he managed to stop the tears somehow.

  Chiyuri sat up, pulled some tissue off the headboard, and dabbed at her eyes. Then she removed the cable from their Neurolinkers and wound it up. “Anyway, anyway, Haru!” she said, shifting gears rather remarkably. “I saw it! You seriously reflected Coolu’s laser, didn’t you! So that means you obtained the ability, right?!”

  “Huh? Uh, um. I dunno.” He sat up on the bed and scratched his head.

  “Cooome on.” Chiyuri turned a magnificent look of exasperation on him. “It’s your own self. You should at least know whether you got it or not!”

  “B-but, like—to confirm it, I’d have to get someone to shoot me with a laser again.”

  “O! Kay! Look! Here! You don’t have to do all that. Just open your Brain Burst console right now and look at Silver Crow’s status screen, and that’s that!”

  “……!!”

  Haruyuki slapped his knee in a moment of understanding, and the look on Chiyuri’s face advanced from exasperated to eyeball-rolling. But he paid her no mind and ran a finger across his virtual desktop. He tapped the flaming B logo and displayed the avatar status in the console screen that opened.