Her speech was interrupted by the sudden roar of an engine. Followed by a voice shouting even louder.
“Tera suuuuuuuuucks!”
Haruyuki shifted his gaze and saw that, having gotten back on his motorcycle again in the intersection off to the east, Ash Roller’s eyes burned with flames of unprecedented rage.
“Hey! Four-Eyed Violet up there! Quit yer smaaack taaaaalk! Mighty Me! Is gonna give you a lesson! Time to mean the dueeeeeeeel!” Red exhaust flames jetted out of the double muffler, and the longhorn motorcycle charged in a straight line toward the building upon which Argon stood.
“A-Ash!” Haruyuki shouted desperately. “No! Run—”
The laser that shot forth cruelly punched out the headlight of the bike and apparently kept going to pierce and ignite the gas tank. The bike was enveloped in hot, red flames struck through with black smoke.
Even as it burned, momentum propelled it forward for a while, but eventually, the bike fell over on its side, and Ash staggered a few steps away from it before pitching forward and collapsing. Perhaps stunned from the serious explosion damage, he showed no signs of getting to his feet again. His health gauge was, like Haruyuki and Cerberus’s, down to 10 percent.
“Ah…Aah…”
This was not the Unlimited Neutral Field, but rather the Battle Royale variation of the regular duel space. Thus, even if Haruyuki’s gauge did drop to zero, the number of his battle losses would go up by one, and his points would drop by however much, and with that, he could escape from the stage. Even still, a cry of anguish slipped out of his mouth, and tears filled his eyes.
The exchange of Burst Points was not the end-all for the duel. There was surely something bigger that they were winning and losing. Haruyuki had said that to Cerberus earlier. Argon Array’s merciless and overwhelming attack was taking something precious away from Haruyuki, Ash, and Cerberus. His tears were for that. Although he wanted to take that something back, to stand and face her, his body wouldn’t move. Still holding Cerberus, Haruyuki looked up at Argon, who stood atop the building.
“That’s that, then.” The Analyst smiled again. “Guess we’ll have to call it a day here. Lucky, huh, boyo? Gettin’ killed by me, you won’t lose too many points. Rest easy.”
A purple light was lodged in the hat lens targeting Haruyuki. Before his eyes, it grew brighter and stronger, and finally focused on one point—
Glint!
What shone was not the laser. A blue glimmer flew in from somewhere and scraped Argon’s left shoulder. A second shot, and a third. Pouring down one shot after the next were not lasers, but ice. Ice lances with sharp tips like needles.
Interrupting her own shot to dodge the others, Argon was pushed to the edge of the roof before the barrage of lances finally stopped.
The smile gone from her face, Argon shot a glare outward, and Haruyuki absently followed her gaze. There was a building about the same height on the north side, with Oume Highway in between them. A fifth Burst Linker stood on the southeast corner of that building, clad in an aqua blue even more transparent than the lances.
It was indeed a female type, but the form wavered unsteadily because her entire body was covered in a clear, flowing liquid—water. Perhaps due to the chill of the Ice stage, particles of ice were mixed in with the water, and these made the avatar’s entire body glitter like diamonds.
The eyes that shone with a pale light in the flowing lines of the face mask locked on Argon Array, and the mysterious water avatar spoke in a quiet yet powerful voice.
“You’re the one who’s going to be crushed by a level one and lose a lot of points.”
Somewhere deep, deep in Haruyuki’s memory, he could hear the babbling of flowing water.
To be continued.
AFTERWORD
Reki Kawahara here bringing you Accel World 12: The Red Crest.
I’m sure all of you kind enough to read the novel now understand the meaning of the title, but in this volume, I finally was able to clarify the details of the incident in which the total point loss of first Red King was brought about by the Black King, an incident which has been teased out endlessly since volume one.
I have the bad habit of adding one thing after another to premises in the story, but unusually for me, this incident is just as I initially conceived of it. Her appearance is finally…well, not yet, but her name’s out there now. (lol) I hope you will wait for the next book to see how Kuroyukihime and Haruyuki face the White King, White Cosmos! Please! In other words, I’ve continued to expand the story again this time, and I am sorry!
Now then, additionally in this volume, we have the appearance of Chocolat Puppeteer, one of the duel avatars I adopted from the Accel World Avatar Contest that I informed you of in the last afterword. She ended up having a more critical role than I was expecting, and I, too, am both delighted and surprised by this. But what was even more unexpected was that my editor, Miki, is quite attached to little Chocolat. (lol) To the instruction of “More licking scenes,” I replied, “But this is an avatar!” In response, I got, “So it’s fine, then!” I see! Yes, of course! I thought, so I put in lots of licking. Nagomi Kiya, designer of this avatar, I am so sorry! And thank you very much!
With regard to the avatar contest, I will announce another three of the works entered in the second round for use as avatars in the novels. They’ll also appear in turn (although the space each gets will likely be different…), so look forward to that!
Around the time this volume comes out, I believe the TV anime will be reaching its climax. Meanwhile, Aqua Current, one of the Four Elements and a character appearing in episodes six and seven of the anime (in Volume 10 of the novels), has finally managed to reappear in this volume. I intend for her to be a regular starting with the next volume, but this means that there will be yet another girl around Haruyuki, which does fill one with trepidation, doesn’t it!
To my illustrator, HIMA, who drew amazing and adorable looks for all the new characters appearing one after another in this volume, including Aqua Current; and to my beleaguered editor, Miki, to whom I gave an entirely different manuscript from the meeting we had in advance—thank you so much.
Volume 13 is scheduled to come out a little later than usual, but the next book for sure should finish this stage, so I hope you’ll join me again!
Reki Kawahara
On a certain day in June 2012
1
The world was spinning. He was profoundly dizzy, like he’d been hit with Silly-Go-Round, Yellow Radio’s special attack, but that was impossible. Because this was the real world—the Arita living room, on the twenty-third floor of a high-rise condo in northern Koenji.
What made Haruyuki stagger, his body pitch back and forth, and his field of view spin back and forth, around and around, was definitely not fever or alcohol or some strange mushroom. The VR space Kuroyukihime had created—code name: ZG01—he had just dived into was having an intense effect on his sense of balance even after he linked out.
“Unh…Ooep…” Finally, a curious noise slipped out of his mouth, and Haruyuki hurriedly pressed his hands against his belly. But the sensation of his stomach trying to turn itself inside out would not leave him.
“W-we can handle it…Be strong, Haruyuki!”
When he somehow managed to turn his gaze in the direction of this voice, he saw Kuroyukihime sitting on the sofa immediately to one side, her pale head bobbing. He couldn’t exactly have a full reverse of the spaghetti with cod roe that his beloved swordmaster had personally cooked for him an hour earlier, not right before her eyes. Maybe it was the standing that was making him dizzy; he took a step back to sit down himself.
But his body lurched once more, knocking him off his intended course by about thirty degrees to the left and back. There was no way he’d be able to correct his trajectory now. Half falling, he set his backside down heavily.
Instead of the harder elasticity of the leather sofa, an extremely enticing sensation, soft and gentle, enveloped him from his
bottom up to his back. At the same time, a kind voice remarked in his ear, “Oh my! Are you all right, Corvus?”
After struggling to make his spinning head understand what had happened, he finally figured it out. Apparently, he had somehow sat down not on the sofa, but on the lap of the third person in the room.
“Eeah! Whah! S-s-s-s-sorry!” He hurriedly tried to stand up, but before he could, supple arms reached out from behind him and squeezed his chest.
“It’s fine. See? Bad feelings, fly away!”
As the owner of the voice spoke, she caressed his chest, and his nausea did actually recede, leaving him totally dumbfounded. Still on the lap of Fuko Kurasaki, who apparently could use de-buff abilities in the real world, he marveled that the distinct drunkenness of just a moment earlier could vanish just like that.
“Exactly how long are you going to be held like that, you?!” Having recovered from her dizziness seemingly under her own power, Kuroyukihime had no sooner picked up a tea cake from the glass table than she was shooting it at Haruyuki’s forehead.
Five minutes later.
“I know you went to the trouble of making that VR space, Kuroyukihime,” Haruyuki said with a sigh as he rubbed his forehead, his senses having at last returned to normal. “But it’s a little too rough. My eyes were spinning while we were inside, too, but I can’t believe it made us this sick even after dropping out.”
“Mmm. I also didn’t believe it would be to this extent. But, Fuko, why are you the only one here who’s fine?!”
The sudden focus of both Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime’s eyes, Fuko brought her glass of iced tea to her lips with a composed look and smiled brightly. “I’ve never been the type to get motion sick. I’m completely fine in cars and 2-D racing games.”
Her “2-D” here meant the type of game that opened up in a game window in a flat screen on her virtual desktop, rather than a full-dive type. In other words, the player’s five senses continued as they were in the real world, so that the G changes due to acceleration and cornering of the vehicle were not in the slightest agreement with the other car behavior within the racing game.
Haruyuki suppressed the urge to “ooep” again just picturing it and brought a lifeless smile to his lips. “Th-that’s amazing. I thought I was pretty tough when it came to car sickness, too, but with this today, I give up.”
“Hee-hee-hee! You just have to get used to it little by little, Corvus. The evening is still young, after all.”
“Y-you plan to keep going?” he asked, the smile frozen on his face.
“Of course.” Fuko nodded as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and turned her eyes on Kuroyukihime, who was sunk into the sofa across from her. “Sacchi went to all the trouble and hard work of making it, that completely zero-gravity VR space. Normally, it’s impossible to activate something like that.”
True enough. Kuroyukihime’s nickname for the handmade ZG01 was short for Zero Gravity No. 1. Until a few minutes earlier, the three Burst Linkers had been on a full dive into a virtual world where the sensation of gravity was completely canceled out. The loading of such worlds, however, was prohibited by every Neurolinker company in a voluntary restraint.
Naturally, this app was completely unconnected with Brain Burst, so the time they’d dived was a mere fifteen minutes. Even so, Haruyuki’s sense of balance had been completely paralyzed, and the instant they returned to reality, he had been assaulted by an intense gravity sickness. The reason Kuroyukihime had taken such pains to create a 0G space—a space that had pretty much convinced him that this was something manufacturers should regulate—however, was directly related to Brain Burst.
Because, currently, the Accelerated World was afire with a single rumor: that exactly one month after the Hermes’ Cord race, on the upcoming July 5, a new stage would be supplied for normal duels—and that this stage would be the completely weightless environment of the Space stage.
“If that rumor’s true, then it’ll make a huge difference if we’re used to the sensation of zero G, after all.” When Haruyuki said this half to himself, he clenched both hands tight and then continued, “I’ll keep trying. At the very least, I’ll get so that I don’t get sick! Kuroyukihime, let’s go again!”
But Kuroyukihime did not immediately respond to this forceful declaration. Looking like she was about to slide off the sofa onto the floor at any moment, she remained silent, her eyes still closed. Normally, this was the sort of situation where she would immediately come back with something like “Mmm, that’s the spirit!” so he wasn’t sure what was going on, and he watched over her hesitantly.
A few seconds later her eyelids finally lifted, and her black eyes stared at the ceiling, a little sluggishly. Through barely parted lips, a single word fell out into the world. “…Bath.”
“Wh-what?”
“I’m taking a bath.” Kuroyukihime stood up, her upper body wobbling unsteadily, still in her uniform because she had come to the Arita house directly from school. Fuko supposedly stopped at home on her way, but for some reason, she too was wearing her high school uniform.
Kuroyukihime staggered to a corner of the living room and hoisted up a large sports bag that apparently held a change of clothes, and Fuko stood as well, with a smile that was almost fondly exasperated.
“Excuse us, Corvus. We’ll be getting in the bath first. I’m just going to go and take care of Sacchi. In that condition, she’s likely to drown in the tub.”
“Y-yuh?” Still frozen solid, Haruyuki thought for a moment and finally understood that Fuko was basically saying, “I’m going to take a bath with Kuroyukihime.” The bath had been run, but he’d thought they were going to use it after their weightlessness training was over, so this was a bit of a surprise attack; his thoughts couldn’t keep up.
“Y-yuh! Please, t-t-t-t-take your time!” Even so, he somehow shifted to vertical mode on the sofa and tried to see the two girls off.
Supporting the still-staggering Kuroyukihime with her right hand, Fuko opened the living room door with her left hand. But then she turned around slowly. “What do you think? Since we’re all here, perhaps you’d like to jaeen—”
The last word fell apart thanks to Kuroyukihime’s fingers flashing out lightning fast to grab Fuko’s cheek.
“Hauch, hauch, Sacchi!” Fuko cried out lightly with a smile as Kuroyukihime dragged her in the opposite direction and disappeared into the hallway. When Fuko’s left hand, waving merrily in his direction, pulled back and shut the door with a bang, Haruyuki exhaled all at once the breath he had been holding.
Slithering down deep into the sofa, he looked at the analogue clock on the wall. The two hands were indicating that eight o’clock had finally rolled around. He wasn’t sure if it was because this was the last Friday in June, but he had gotten an e-mail from his mother to the effect that she wouldn’t be home that day, which meant the night was still young.
At any rate, the purpose of this gathering was Space-stage special training, so when it came down to it, the other three members of Nega Nebulus—Takumu, Chiyuri, and Utai—should have had every right to be there, too. But there was a reason why only Kuroyukihime and Fuko were taking part, and why they had both come prepared with sleepover kits.
On the night before the Hermes’ Cord race approximately one month earlier, heavy rain, followed by thunder and lightning, had triggered network outages—so Kuroyukihime had stayed over at Haruyuki’s for the first time. And the next morning, Fuko had arrived at the Arita house, the base of their race sortie, a fair bit earlier than the set time and had clearly witnessed a pajama-clad Kuroyukihime coming out of Haruyuki’s room and disappearing with a yawn into the washroom.
Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime took turns explaining, and after acknowledging at any rate the inevitability of the situation, Fuko had declared, Raker Smile fully deployed, “Please invite me to a sleepover as well sometime this month. Under that condition, I would be delighted to keep this quiet.”
For Haruyuki, he was certai
n it was at best a joke, or in the event that it wasn’t, that she would forget over the course of the month. But. When he saw her in the Accelerated World the other day, Fuko had smiled gently and—with the utterance, “June’s almost over, you know? ”—had made him aware that her declaration had neither been a joke nor faded away into obscurity. After discussing it with the other concerned party (Kuroyukihime) and shaking all the while, this and that had happened to lead to the present situation. In other words, what was supposedly a session of weightlessness training for the three of them was also a stormy sleepover.
Naturally, it absolutely was not the case that he was unhappy his beloved Legion Master and Submaster had come over to hang out. However, that said, he didn’t have the mental leeway to simply have fun. Because Kuroyukihime and Fuko (and this was also something he was glad for, but) both had the powerful conceit of being Silver Crow’s teacher, and when they were together, they had a tendency to try to drill him, with a strange rivalry sparking between them. If they ended up saying something about a little instruction in the Accelerated World while they were at it once the 0G training was over—actually, yeah, that would almost certainly happen.
“I wonder what’d happen if I ran away to Chiyu’s place right now,” Haruyuki murmured, pulling his body back into the sofa.
Chiyuri Kurashima, who lived two floors down, was likely to cover for him, grumbling about it as she did so, but he probably couldn’t escape the super-sensitive radars of Kuroyukihime and Fuko at that distance. In which case, Takumu’s house in the neighboring building— No, wait, what about Utai Shinomiya’s house on the southern side of Suginami Ward, or the cake shop occupied by the Red Legion Prominence in even more far-off Sakuradai in Nerima Ward…?
Then, at that moment: klink-a-ring! Together with the light sound effect, a window opened to fill Haruyuki’s virtual desktop. A live call through the Arita home server. This was the image communication system using the security cameras set up in every room, which meant—