He figured the basic idea here was that they would first take advantage of their position high up to gather information or use it for a surprise attack, but then Curren spoke and upended this theory.
“We’ll go down.”
“O-okay.” He followed her, unable to disagree.
Given that they had been on the seventh floor of a building, it looked to be more than twenty meters from the top of the tree to the surface of the ground, but the water-covered avatar moved casually forward and “flowed” down, as if perfectly adhered to the side of the vertical trunk. After watching for a moment with wide eyes, Haruyuki hurriedly stepped out into the air himself.
His special-attack gauge was at zero, so he couldn’t fly, but if he spread his wings, it was possible for him to glide. He descended, carving out a spiral in the air, and reached the ground at basically the same time as Curren. He selected a place free of poison bog to set his feet down.
Turning his face toward the upward slope of Meidai Street, it wasn’t even ten seconds before he heard the sound of weighty footsteps. It appeared that at least one of their opponents was fairly heavyweight. But for some reason, he didn’t hear a second set of footfalls, even though both guide cursors were pointing in the same direction.
He learned the reason for that soon enough.
From behind a rotting baobab that was once a sporting goods store, the super-large avatar he had been expecting came flying out, nearly two meters tall, with a super-tiny avatar perched neatly on his left shoulder.
“Sorry to keep you waaaaaaiting!” the one on the shoulder cried out in the voice of an adorable little girl. She was just barely a meter tall. Her body was a fairly whitish silver, and while her armor didn’t have quite the mirror finish of Silver Crow’s, the green light of the stage still reflected off it neatly. With her long hair parts and the armor skirt that flared out around her, she was basically a doll. There was no doubt that this was the level-four Nickel Doll.
The silver doll waited a second after her initial shout before continuing in a slightly dissatisfied tone. “Or that’s what I’d like to say, buuuuut! You’re the ones who barged in on us, and then you wait for us to move. It’s totally nooooo fair! I mean, you just wasted two whole minutes here!”
“I-I’m sorry…I’m not used to the terrain around here, so…,” Haruyuki apologized unconsciously, rubbing the back of his head with one hand.
The giant that served as the doll’s perch laughed ponderously. “Hmph! Apologies aren’t gonna cut it. While you were standing around scratching your butts, we were building up our object destruction bonuses.”
“Urk!” Hurriedly looking up at the enemy gauges, Haruyuki saw their blue special-attack gauges had indeed reached almost 30 percent full without his noticing. That was a big advantage.
The giant, the level-three Sand Duct, wore rough armor the color of sand, just like his name. Haruyuki’s eyes were immediately drawn to the square holes on the tops of both wrists. If those were air ducts as the avatar name implied, then they probably had the ability to either produce or suck air. Either way, he needed to be careful.
As he carved this into his mind, Curren had come to stand behind him at some point. “I’ll take Duct,” she said quietly. “You get Doll. She generates an electric current with her hands. Be careful you don’t get caught in it.”
“Aaaah! You’re giving him spoilers!” Curren’s voice should have been too quiet to be heard by their enemies, but the sharp-eared Nickel Doll erupted in indignation.
“As expected of the bouncer.” The foundation beneath her, Sand Duct, heavily raised his massive right arm. “You’ve got info if nothing else. Sorry, but we’ll have to break up your little strategy time now.”
Krrrr. A low rumbling. Immediately after, Haruyuki thought he felt air blowing out at them.
“Sand Blast!!” As the giant roared the name of the technique, a sandy vortex of wind shot out of the air duct of his right hand. Although Haruyuki leapt immediately to the right, he had to be careful of the poison bog, and he was a little slow off the line. His left arm was momentarily swallowed up to the elbow by the vortex.
“Aaah! Hot!” Assaulted by the sensation of being stabbed with countless needles, he cried out, unable to stand it. When he finally freed his arm from the wind, part of the shining mirrored surface was clouded over, as if worked over by fine sandpaper. The wind probably included fine sand particles, which could damage even the metallic armor of a metal color. In that instant, his health gauge was cut down 3 percent or so.
Wondering if Aqua Current, behind him and off to one side, had managed to make it into the clear, he turned his gaze in that direction—only to cry out again in surprise. “Huh?”
Although Curren had adopted a defensive stance with both arms crossed, she was simply standing upright in the middle of the sandstorm. But her health gauge wasn’t moving a pixel. He looked more closely and saw that the sand particles, the source of damage in Sand Duct’s technique, were swallowed up by the water flowing over and simply cycled around, never reaching the main body of the avatar.
When the giant’s special-attack gauge was finally exhausted and the sandstorm stopped, Curren dropped her arms as if nothing had happened. “Particle-type attacks don’t work on me,” she said. “You can have it back.”
She casually raised her right hand, and the sand particles in her water armor concentrated there. When she abruptly dropped her hand, sandy water formed a slender lance and flew from her fingertips toward Sand Duct’s shoulder, where Nickel Doll was sitting.
“Eeeek!” Cute up to the last moment—or maybe she deliberately yelped adorably—Doll leapt down from Duct’s shoulder. A second and then a third sand lance targeted the tiny avatar. Screaming “Ah!” and “Heeey!” Doll dodged them with a surprising nimbleness and bounced around the islands of ground in the poison bog.
Haruyuki watched in mute amazement and then suddenly gasped. Curren was deliberately limiting the range of her attack in order to separate the enemy tag team. Which meant that his job was to follow up on the attack on Doll.
I can kick and cry, but that won’t fix anything. Forget that you only have seven points left, and fight with everything you’ve got. Just like always, duel with all your might.
“Aaaaah!” he shouted, and dashed fiercely toward Nickel Doll, fifteen meters ahead of him. He kept his eyes laser-focused on his nemesis, careful not to touch the poison ground. To his left, Curren had also closed in on Sand Duct and started fighting hand-to-hand.
Abruptly, from the sky above, the cheers of dozens of people rained down on them. The Gallery. It was basic etiquette that duel spectators not shout out during the back-and-forth between the duelers before the real fight began, so they had probably been holding back until that moment. In among the cheering voices, he could hear shouts of “Crooow!” and “Flyyyy!” It seemed people knew him even here in Jimbocho, far from his home of Suginami.
As if spurred on by those cries, Haruyuki launched a right roundhouse kick as soon as he landed on the island where Nickel Doll was waiting for him. “Yah!”
The barely meter-high doll avatar crouched down and dodged the kick. But having anticipated this, Haruyuki changed the trajectory of his kick in midair to lead into a downward heel drop. Doll tried to dodge this as well, rather spectacularly, but the attack caught the right edge of the armor skirt spread out around her, and her health gauge dropped with a show of dazzling sparks characteristic of each of their metal colors.
“How mean!” She sounded very much like a game character Haruyuki had liked a long time ago, and he had never really been able to handle anyone yelling at him like that, but he was in no position to falter now. His opponent was level four, after all. A warrior who had overcome what his teacher Kuroyukihime called the “first wall.”
“I’m sorry!” Even as he apologized, he continued his relentless rush with both hands and both feet. Silver Crow had no particular attacks other than the wings on his back, but he had learned o
ver the last two weeks that with the speed he gained from his light weight, his hands and feet, covered in hard armor, were actually impressive weapons.
That said, Nickel Doll was exactly the same: small, lightweight, and made of metal armor. Although he sent magnificent sparks scattering with a glancing attack from time to time, the damage wasn’t anything to speak of. If he didn’t throw his all into some move, he really couldn’t hope for a clean hit. The moment this thought crossed his mind, Nickel Doll leapt at him, as if seeing his panic. Her slender left hand neatly caught hold of his right, and her right his left.
Too easy! I still have my head butt! He started to counter with his head wrapped in its tough armor, but just as he was on the verge of letting fly, Curren’s voice came back to life in his ears.
Electric current from her hands…
“Ngh!!” He immediately canceled his head butt and threw everything he had into a backward leap. At almost the same time as his hands pulled away from hers, a fierce spark jetted out of the round parts visible in the center of her palms. He felt the faintest electric shock, and a momentary jolt raced through his body.
Checking that the hit to his health gauge was kept under 5 percent this time, Haruyuki touched down on the neighboring tiny island. “That was close,” he muttered to himself.
“Awww!” Doll began to scream, stomping her feet in adorable frustration. “No fair running away! I was all set to give you such a tight, shocking hug!”
“I-I’ll pass, thanks!” He shook his head back and forth, and checked both of their health gauges again. Haruyuki still had 90 percent left, and Doll had dropped to about 80 percent. Sand Duct, fighting off to the side, was also around 80 percent, while Aqua Current basically had a full tank. He deeply wanted to watch the legendary bodyguard in action, but at that moment, he needed to focus on the enemy before him.
Nickel Doll swung her silver ringlets and snorted. But then a coquettish smile rose up on her small face mask. “Heeeey? You’re him, aren’t you? That flying avatar who showed up in Shinjuku recently.”
“Y-yeah, well…” His guard up, Haruyuki nodded.
The avatar, so like a silver Western-style doll, smiled even more alluringly. “Why are you teamed up with the bouncer? Are you maybe in some trouble points-wise? Then, look—how about you join us? If you do, I’ll lend you however many points you neeeed.”
“What?!” Haruyuki unconsciously stiffened, and Doll jumped, skirt fluttering, moving to the island he was on.
“And look, we’ve even got the same color skin.” She walked briskly toward him as she continued in a sweet voice. “We join up, and we’ll be, like, the talk of the Accelerated World, you know? And the truth is, I don’t like that sand dude. I mean, he’s super scrapey and all. But look—like, your skin’s all smooth and soft. ”
Before he knew it, Nickel Doll was standing right there in front of him, the index finger of her left hand up against his chest tracing out lazy circles. The ticklish sensation stopped his thoughts. Something moved on the left edge of his field of view, now dyed a hazy pale pink. Doll’s right hand. Her index finger flicked out to gently touch his left hip.
“Whoa!”
Barely coming to his senses in time, Haruyuki sprang back at basically the same time as powerful sparks shot out of Doll’s fingers. A momentary shock shook him once more, whisking away 5 percent of his gauge.
“N-no fair with surprise attacks!” Haruyuki shouted angrily at having his pure male heart toyed with, moving to an island farther back.
The silver doll cackled loudly. “Awww! Did I hurt your big, manly feelings? I’m sorrrry. But if I let someone like you join up, my Legion Master would be suuuuuper angry at me!”
That was probably true, because the Legion Master for Nega Nebulus, which Haruyuki belonged to, was the Black King, the most wanted person in the Accelerated World. But for Haruyuki, this was Doll’s big mistake. He jabbed his index finger in her direction and shouted, “I didn’t even want to join up with you! And you didn’t hurt my feelings or whatever! Definitely not!”
If he was thinking more coolly, he could see how this could come off as a boy whose feelings had indeed been hurt, but he forced his brain to switch gears and leapt forward. Perhaps seeing that they were done messing around, the look on Nickel Doll’s face changed, and her electric hands snapped into a ready position. Most likely, the right hand was the positive terminal and the left the negative. He assumed that if she caught hold of him with both hands, electric current would flow through his avatar and do some serious damage.
At a speed an order of magnitude greater than anything she’d shown so far, Doll’s hands darted out to capture Haruyuki. But he feigned dodging to the right, and then sprang in the direction his opponent was not expecting—to the left, the middle of the poisonous purple bog. Both legs were swallowed up to the knee. Doll was completely taken off guard, her back turned to Haruyuki.
Still sunken into the mire, Haruyuki reached toward the small avatar a meter ahead of him and grabbed hold of her narrow waist before doing something like a German suplex–turned-throw to toss her, full strength, into the bog behind him.
“Aieeeeeee!” This time, her scream seemed real, and she plunged headfirst into the poisonous bog. An unpleasantly colored smoke rose up, and her health gauge ticked slowly downward.
Nickel Doll vaulted to her feet immediately, and after confirming that the only nearby island was behind Haruyuki, she shouted sharply, “Are you trying for a draw or something?! Well, let me tell you one thing! When it comes to HP, I have way more at level four than you do at level two…” She abruptly fell silent. She had finally noticed the fact that Haruyuki’s health gauge was basically not going down at all, even though he had been sunken in the bog this whole time.
Drawing a little on Aqua Current’s line earlier, Haruyuki snapped his index fingers at her. “I’m silver. Poison doesn’t work on me!”
The members of the Gallery way up on the tops of the baobab trees erupted instantly.
Exactly. Although they were both metal colors, the particular characteristics differed slightly depending on the type of metal. Generally speaking, precious metals like gold and silver were strong against special attacks, while base metals like steel and iron were strong against physical attacks. But even among these, Haruyuki’s silver had an absolute resistance to poison attacks. Even in the real world, silver ions were used for sterilization because of their powerful antibacterial properties.
Even during this short standoff, Nickel Doll’s health gauge was gradually decreasing. She would also have had some poison resistance due to her metal color, but taken along with her slight armor, it wouldn’t have been perfect. If they went into hand-to-hand combat in the swamp, it was obvious that Doll would exhaust her resources sooner, even if their blows were equal.
“Hmph…I get it. The reason you were avoiding the swamp this whole time was to put me off guard and drag me into a situation like this, huh?” Doll glanced down at the purple mush that had swallowed her nearly up to her waist. “And you are way over on the left end of the metal chart, too. But, like, treating nickel like fake silver, it doesn’t work like that. There are a lot of different ways to use it. You know? Like mixing in hydrogen and generating electricity, right?”
The moment he heard those words, something flickered in the back of Haruyuki’s mind.
In the present day of 2046, nearly all the EVs and electric scooters racing along the roads of the town—but also of course mobile devices like Neurolinkers—used lightweight, large-capacity silicon nanowire batteries. However, he had learned in science class that until twenty or so years earlier, there had been a secondary battery with an emphasis on safety. He was pretty sure it had been called a nickel hydrogen battery. This was the backbone to Nickel Doll’s electrical abilities.
The silver Western-style doll smiled faintly, seemingly paying no attention to her HP being steadily shaved away by the quagmire. “And, like, silver also has a bunch of properties other th
an antibacterial. I’ll teach you about them right now.”
The words had no sooner left her mouth than she was thrusting both hands into the swamp water. Her health gauge began to drop even faster, but her special-attack gauge was simultaneously charged, and the instant it had passed 70 percent, the call of the special attack name rang out.
“Anode Cathode!!”
Pale sparks shot out in circles on the surface of the bog, some too quick for Haruyuki to escape.
Zzzt! He was hit with a brutal shock. His field of view basically whited out. He couldn’t even cry out with the pain.
“Ngh!!” Instinctively, he tried to leap up onto the island behind him, but for some reason, his avatar had stiffened in place and wouldn’t obey him. In the top left of his white-hot field of view, he saw his own health gauge being rapidly eaten away. Trapped in position, Haruyuki realized for the first time the immense risk that had been hidden in his own strategy to bring the fight to hand-to-hand combat.
It might have been a bog of poison, but it was essentially water. And the more impurities water had, the better an electrical conductor it was. Leaping into the bog meant that he’d deliberately connected a circuit between himself and his opponent.
However.
Nickel Doll was also waist deep in the bog herself, so she shouldn’t have been able to escape from the electrical damage, either. Although it was rare for a full-dive fighting game, Brain Burst allowed self-attacks, meaning that it was possible to attack your own self, and, depending on the situation, you could also be dragged into the range of an attack. Maybe Doll thought she could make it out alive even if she was taking damage at the same time, based on the difference in their total HP, but if the damage she was taking from the swamp was added in, she was the one whose gauge would run out first.
Making this instantaneous judgment, Haruyuki endured the ongoing electrical shock as he turned his eyes to his opponent’s health gauge. And then he got another shock.