Elements

  Just as it looked like they were on the verge of being swallowed up by the jaws flung open wide, the two nimbly turned. When they came up directly above the dinosaur, they began to rotate at high speed, as if to surround Sulfur Pot. Instantly, the water began to swirl and soon became an enormous tornado.

  “Whoa! Y-you—! What are—?!” Sulfur Pot shouted from the center of the vortex, as his body gently rose up from the dinosaur’s back. Here, finally, Kuroyukihime understood Ruka and Mana’s intention. They were trying to separate knight from Enemy with the force of the vortex’s rotation and suction.

  “Ngh! Ngaaah!” Sulfur tried intently to pull on the reins, but the current was not something that could be fought by a yellow avatar with fundamentally low arm strength. After a brief tug of war, his hands finally came away from the reins, and Sulfur Pot was sent flying up near the water surface, spinning in the waterspout.

  “Aaaaah!”

  As a high-pitched cry escaped the avatar, Dolphin and Merrow stopped their breakneck-speed turns and chased after him. They likely intended to finish him off, but what about the Enemy? In the moment Kuroyukihime wondered this, Mana looked back for a second and shouted, “Sister! Cut the dinosaur’s bridle!”

  “Understood. Leave it to me!!”

  The side giving the orders and the side getting orders had completely flipped, but Kuroyukihime responded immediately. This was the middle of the ocean, the world of these girls who had been born and raised on the Okinawan coast.

  She couldn’t match the two of them for speed, but she plunged through the water using the swords of her legs as fins. Soon enough, she closed in on the Legend-class Enemy, the enormous dinosaur Nidhogg, flailing helplessly.

  Having lost its knight, the dinosaur was apparently still not free to move on its own. If she attacked its likely weak points, the throat and the eyes, with all her might now, it might have been possible to defeat it, but Kuroyukihime didn’t even consider that option. She simply glared at the leather strap wrapped around the beast’s snout.

  Ten meters away, eight, six meters—once she had gotten this close, she righted herself and pulled back the sword of her right arm as far as she could.

  “Aaaagh! Death By Piercing!!”

  Bluish-purple blades extended outward, glittering in the ocean water, to neatly and unerringly slice through just the bridle of the beast. The leather split to the sides, and the reins finally fell from the monster’s mouth. Even freed from the item that had controlled it, the Enemy only moved its limbs slowly for a while. But then, abruptly, its eyes shone with a sinister red gleam.

  Although Kuroyukihime immediately readied herself for battle, she soon realized the truth: The dinosaur didn’t have its sights set on Black Lotus. Its tapered snout jerked and pointed straight up. It twisted its long tail furiously, paddled powerfully at the water with all four limbs, and started to ascend with a nimbleness that called into question its awkward movement up to that point.

  In its line of sight were Sulfur Pot, drifting near the surface of the ocean, and Dolphin and Merrow, spinning at high speed around him to prevent him from moving.

  “N-Nick!” Sulfur called out in a high-pitched voice, seeing the approaching Nidhogg. “Right, over here!! Rip these two bratty small fries to pieces!!”

  Ruka and Mana didn’t make a move to flee even when they saw the Enemy charging toward them. It was almost as if they knew what was going to happen next.

  Released from the taming, the massive dinosaur ascended with the force of a large submarine toward the person who had been its master until a minute or so earlier.

  “How do you like this, small fry?!” Sulfur Pot cried exultantly, both hands spread out as if to welcome the Enemy. “Even without those reins, Nick knows that I—and I alone—am his master! See! Soon enough, you’ll all be ripped to pieces, fish food—”

  But Sulfur Pot abruptly slowed down midspeech.

  He thrust his open arms out ahead of him and quickly shook his head. “That’s…No way—it can’t be. Why…Nick, why would you…?”

  The enormous dinosaur passed between Dolphin and Merrow without as much as a glance at either of them. It popped its mouth open and turned rows of ominously sharp teeth toward Sulfur.

  “No way! No way! Nick, I’m your master! No way! Stop! Stoooo—!!”

  The scream was abruptly interrupted there. The enormous maw came down on Sulfur Pot’s head. The countless teeth bit into the yellow torso. The armor resisted the pressure for a mere instant. Fine cracks popped up all over the avatar’s body, and then the body turned into thousands of fragments and scattered. It was a quick and cruel death.

  Kuroyukihime, Ruka, and Mana wordlessly stared at the enormous Legend-class Enemy. The dinosaur turned its head absently and considered the two girls nearby, and then Black Lotus floating a little ways off.

  Then, abruptly, it moved its head once more and began to swim east near the ocean surface. With the swiftness of an actual marine dinosaur, it receded before their eyes. The large ripples spread out behind it, faded, and finally disappeared, until they could no longer see the Enemy.

  Kuroyukihime gently moved her legs and ascended until she was beside the girls. “You did good, Dolphin, Merrow,” she said. “That was some wonderful fighting.”

  Suddenly, both girls stretched out their hands and clung to Kuroyukihime. The small avatars were trembling. Most likely, this was the first real battle both Ruka and Mana had had with not an Enemy, but a Burst Linker. The tension of the passionate battle was gradually starting to release.

  She held them both gently and ascended farther. When she popped her head out above the water, she spied a rainbow curtain in the perfectly blue sky, approaching from the distance. The effective time for the forced change Megumi’s avatar had brought about in the field was over, and the world was attempting to return to normal.

  “Sis,” Ruka said slowly in her ear.

  “Hmm?” She shifted her gaze in that direction. “What is it?”

  “So, um…I’m gonna get stronger. I’m gonna train more and study more and get stronger. And then…and then someday…”

  Here, she shut her mouth tightly, and Kuroyukihime gently stroked the face of the young Burst Linker with the flat of her sword.

  “Mmm, get strong. I’ll be waiting. For the time when we can meet again in this world.”

  “Aah, no fair! Sister, me too!” Mana shouted, and Kuroyukihime patted her head with her other sword. The aurora was finally almost there, and the clear blue of the Ocean stage was returning to the original reddish brown of the Weathered stage.

  “Still, I feel like we’re forgetting something.” Kuroyukihime cocked her head, but she soon shrugged as if to say Oh well and waited for the moment when the ocean would disappear.

  She remembered what she’d been forgetting as soon as she spotted the screw-shaped avatar tumbling along the ground immediately after she touched down on the floor of the Weathered stage.

  Forgotten not only by Kuroyukihime, but even by his beloved students, Crikin had no sooner returned to the bar than he was ordering a giant mug of aged awamori and getting drunk again. “S’fine, s’fine. This great me’s just a screw and all.”

  Suppressing a wry smile, Kuroyukihime apologized before bringing her ear close to his head and murmuring, “Sorry, but would you send Dolphin and Merrow home through the portal first? I don’t want to show them an ugly part of this world.”

  With just that, Crikin seemed to understand Kuroyukihime’s intention. Nodding, he drained his cup before standing up. “Come on, then. We’re going home, my students…Oh, right—before we do, Lotus, here.”

  She caught the object he flicked at her with the tip of her sword: a card.

  “It sank down to the bottom of the ocean, so I picked it up. But I got no way to use it, so I’ll give it to you as thanks for this.”

  “Oh?” Casting her eyes to the surface of the card shining with silver light, she saw the text ENHANCED ARMAMENT: MYSTICAL REINS carved in s
mall letters.

  “Enhanced Armament Mystical Reins?” she murmured, and then she finally understood what it was. It had to be the reins that controlled the Legend-class Enemy, the massive dinosaur Nidhogg. After Kuroyukihime severed the bridle, the Enhanced Armament went into a field drop state, and because the user Sulfur Pot had died after that, it returned to a sealed card state, free of ownership.

  “Mmm. You can give it to me, but as for a use—”

  “Well, don’t say that. In the north of the Okinawa area, there’s all kinds of interesting Enemies, like a horse that can fly and stuff.”

  “Hmm. Well, if you want to give it to me, then I will gratefully accept it.”

  When Kuroyukihime opened her storage and tucked the item away, Crikin smiled, seemingly satisfied. “Wohkay! Come on, get up, Roo! Mah! You fall asleep here, and you won’t be able to sleep tonight!”

  At some point, Ruka and Mana had fallen asleep in a corner of the bar, and Crikin yanked them to their feet before walking outside the bar. Kuroyukihime raised the sword of her right hand lightly at the girls, who were rubbing tired eyes, and then murmured quietly, “Now, then.”

  The battle was over, but there was still something left that needed to be done. When she stood up and left the shop herself, she checked that Crikin and the girls had headed off to the hotel and then moved a hundred meters or so to the west.

  There, on the surface of the ground, was a small, flickering yellow light. Naturally, it was the marker of Sulfur Pot’s death after he was eaten by Nidhogg.

  Kuroyukihime began to speak quietly at Sulfur, who should have been in a ghost state near the marker and watching her. “Sulfur Pot, if, when you next regenerate, you tell me everything you know about the cheat tool you’re using for the long-distance dive from Tokyo, I will let you go today. However, if you don’t tell me…” She lowered her voice slightly. “…I will continue to kill you until you feel like talking. For however many hours, however many days.”

  12

  “Siiiiis! Come back to Uchina agaaaaaaain!!”

  “Sister, taaaaaaake caaaare!”

  The two girls waved their arms so wildly in front of the main gates of the resort hotel that they threatened to fly off, until they got themselves in unison with a “One, two.”

  “Njichahbiraaaaaaa!! [Good-bye!!]” they yelled.

  Kuroyukihime waved back at them from the window of the bus, then leaned back in her seat once they disappeared from sight. Hidden beyond the marbadigo trees, she let out a long sigh. She thought that perhaps the high school–aged boy tilting a can of flat lemon juice (probably) on a bench a little ways off from the girls had maybe been Crikin in the real, but she decided not to pursue it.

  “Making such adorable fans like that on a trip—that’s so like you, Hime,” Megumi said, smiling in the seat next to her.

  She cleared her throat and rebutted, “Th-they’re not fans or anything. I suppose you could call it an academic exchange—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Then I’ll just make a note of that in the student council log.”

  “Uh! No, that’s a little…”

  Thursday, April 18, 10:00 AM.

  The Umesato Junior High ninth graders had been split up onto two large EV buses and were heading from Henoko to Yoron Island. They were scheduled to return to Tokyo Saturday evening, so the school trip was at last in the final stages. The other students seemed to be even more excited, building toward the climax of the trip, but for Kuroyukihime, she was of a mind to spend that day at least relaxing lazily. She had, after all, taken part in the very unexpected optional tour of a battle with a Legend-class Enemy in the Henoko area.

  Megumi Wakamiya sitting to her left should have been the same, but she was grinning the same as always and flipping through the Yoron Island virtual guide. Apparently, not only did Megumi not remember the events of the Unlimited Neutral Field, she had no memory of visiting the dive booth where Kuroyukihime, Ruka, and Mana had been.

  The evening before, having fulfilled her objective and burst out, Kuroyukihime discovered that in the place of Ruka and Mana, who had disappeared, Megumi sat with her eyes closed on the sofa next to her. When Kuroyukihime shook her shoulders, Megumi opened her eyes right away and said curiously, with a baffled look on her face, “What am I doing here?”

  After that, they went back to their room, changed their clothes, ate supper, got in the bath, and went to bed, and although Megumi didn’t say a single word about the Accelerated World, Kuroyukihime sensed a modest change had come over her. The shadow that had clouded her eyes ever since the previous night had disappeared.

  When they went back to their room after supper, Kuroyukihime directed with Megumi’s Neurolinker under the pretext of syncing key student council files, and secretly checked her local memory. But the BB program was not there. In the end, she still didn’t know if Megumi had really been a Burst Linker in the past, or even if she had, through what logic she had managed to open the door to the Accelerated World once more.

  However, Kuroyukihime felt like that was all right. That chance meeting was certainly a momentary miracle given to them by this mysterious island of Okinawa.

  Breaking into this reverie was the text mail icon flashing in the upper part of her field of view. When she opened it, she saw that the sender was Crikin, and the message noted that he had found the object Kuroyukihime had given him information on, located in a desolate dive café on the outskirts of town.

  A Neurolinker illegally modified so that it could start up and connect globally without being equipped—Sulfur Pot confessed that when he visited Henoko on a school trip in January, he had hidden the Neurolinker given to him by the upper echelons of his “organization” in a sofa at the dive café. Most likely, the Neurolinker was equipped with the backdoor program. The program was supposed to be unusable now that the BB central server had applied a patch, but assuming the patch checked if the BB program was in the Neurolinker, there was only one way to get around it.

  That was to install the backdoor not only in the Neurolinker, but the real Brain Burst itself as well.

  It was very daring, a method so terrible it sent chills up her spine. Because the only ways to get a Neurolinker with the BB program on it were to seize it in an attack in the real…or make a child without telling them anything and then immediately take their Neurolinker.

  Despite the fact that Sulfur Pot had told her about the mechanism for the long-distance dive, he didn’t spill a word about the “organization” he belonged to. She thought briefly about continuing to kill him, but she also had the automatic disconnect safety set, so she let him go there.

  Crikin’s mail also noted that the personless Neurolinker had been powered off when he found it, and the memory had physically self-destructed. It truly was a daring and deeply cautious organization. Someday, the time would likely come when they clashed head-on.

  Well, when it does, we’ll beat them down without mercy, she thought, closing her mailer, when a steaming cup was offered from beside her. From the scent, it appeared to be tea with some kind of citrus flavor. She gratefully accepted and said, “Thanks, Megumi.”

  “You’re welcome.” The smile on the face of her good friend changed slightly, and she continued in a quiet voice, “Hey, Hime?”

  “Mmm?”

  “When we get back to Tokyo, I’m thinking about writing a story set in Okinawa. A story about the ocean and a dinosaur and a mermaid…and a knight in black. Like yesterday? I had a dream about it.”

  “You did?” Kuroyukihime smiled and gently placed her own hand on Megumi’s. “Naturally, you’ll let me be your first reader?”

  “Ha-ha! Okay, be ready for it, then. Seems like it’s going to be a bit of a long one.”

  “Mm-hmm, I’m looking forward to it. And also to the souvenir you got for me. I wonder what you picked out. Hmm, according to my cosmic instincts—”

  “Ah! You can’t, Hime! What if you actually guess it?!”

  “Mm-hmm-hmm. I can see it! Well, t
his—”

  “I said, stop it! We’re going to have a real fight if you say anything else!”

  On the luggage rack above the heads of the two girls as they play-fought and generally had fun, two small suitcases were lined up next to each other.

  Inside Kuroyukihime’s bag was a necklace of pink shells arranged in the shape of cherry blossoms.

  And in Megumi’s bag, there was a necklace of black-lip oyster pearls worked into a black spangle butterfly.

  It was a few days later when they exchanged their presents in the student council office and they were greatly surprised at the wonderful match, grins spreading across both faces.

  “Whoa. So this is the fourth-generation full-dive test machine?” I said, as I stared up at the massive 3-D rectangle enshrined before my eyes.

  The exterior panels of unpolished aluminum shone dully, and several large cooling fans whined. One side of the box was connected with a gel bed, and jutting out over it like a headrest was a rough helmet-shaped brain interface.

  “It’s huge. It looks even bigger than the early arcade consoles, Higa,” I said, turning around. The male operator turned toward the control console lifted his face and shrugged, sporting a hint of regret.

  “Even so, it’s much more compact than my initial estimation, Kirigaya. And the difference in specs between this and the first-generation machines in the old arcades is like a Nintendo and a Drecap captureboard!”

  “…I’ve never actually seen either of those.”

  “What?! You’re missing out on life! Come over to my place and we’ll have a retro game training camp…”

  Going on and on about weird things like this was Takeru Higa, a senior engineer who had developed the most cutting-edge VR machines in the world, but you’d never guess that from the way he looked. With hair that stood up in sharp, thin spikes; excessively large, round glasses; and a T-shirt with a game character on it, he would have been a hundred times more at home in the shops of Akihabara than in the dim high-tech room.