Elements

  Kuroyukihime finished the call rather hurriedly and stopped waving her hand long enough to press the DISCONNECT button on her virtual desktop.

  A window was displayed in the center of her field of view, featuring the roundly plump face of the pink pig avatar. She gulped hard when it disappeared, pushing back the sadness that immediately rose up.

  She took a few steps onto the burning sand of the beach, only to slip under the shade of an anti-UV/IR beach parasol. There, she picked up a small movie camera from the table mounted on the pole of the parasol. In the current day and age, when nearly all Neurolinkers were equipped with a lens, the device belonged to another era, but given that it was specialized to its task, the quality was remarkably good. Even if it did mean a bit of added weight in her luggage, she deeply wanted to send high-definition video back to the boy in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward.

  She turned the camera off and tucked it away in a small pouch, then returned the whole thing to the table, where she sat down in a deck chair under the umbrella. As she did so, a faint sigh slipped out of her.

  This is no good. He wouldn’t want me to be to be depressed on this trip. Okay, on the count of three, I cheer up. One, two—

  But Kuroyukihime didn’t make it to three. Because at some point, two hands reached out from behind to press down tightly on her bathing suit—or more precisely, to massage her chest.

  “Hnggaaah?!” She leapt out of the deck chair, spun around in the air, and landed facing a girl in a one-piece swimsuit.

  Her short, fluffy hair matched perfectly with her gentle appearance, her face with its unceasing gentle smile. Her name was Megumi Wakamiya. Like Kuroyukihime, she was a member of the student council at the private Umesato Junior High School. She was the secretary.

  “M-M-M-Megumi! Wh-wh-what are you doing all of a sudden?!”

  “It’s just—I called you a bunch, Hime, but you didn’t even notice me. It’s time to meet for the sea kayak tour.”

  “O-oh…right…” She sat down in the deck chair again, and after thinking for about two seconds, she shook her head slightly. “Sorry, I’m skipping the tour. Because…How about we say I don’t feel well?”

  She pressed the SCHOOL TRIP SCHEDULE shortcut icon on her virtual desktop and clicked on the sea kayak tour set for one PM in the plan that day. Kuroyukihime quickly pressed the CANCEL button in the dialog box that popped up and was about to type some trumped-up excuse into the reason box.

  “If you put it’s ‘because you’re not feeling well,’ they’ll want follow-up info, which’ll be a hassle, Hime. I’d go with ‘school council business,’ maybe,” Megumi said, grinning.

  “I get it.” Kuroyukihime’s own lips turned up at the ends unconsciously. “After they worked us so hard to get everything ready, we should at least be allowed this much of a perk.”

  She typed in exactly what she had been told and then dismissed the window with a wave of her right hand. She leaned back in the deck chair and exhaled lightly before turning her face to see her friend off.

  But Megumi, who had ostensibly come to fetch Kuroyukihime for the optional tour, lowered herself into the other deck chair to the right of the umbrella pole, and Kuroyukihime blinked unthinkingly a few times.

  Feeling her friend’s gaze upon her, the student council secretary winked. “I’m passing on the sea kayak, too. It’s a family rule handed down by my ancestors to never get on a boat that doesn’t have a lifeboat.”

  “Were your ancestors on a luxury ship that was in a shipwreck?” Grinning wryly, she reached out to the cooler on the sand and pulled out two bottles of shequasar, a lemon juice native to Okinawa, handing one to Megumi.

  They both opened their mouths at the same time, both made sour faces at the same time, and both set the bottles down on the table at the same time before looking at each other once more and laughing briefly in tandem.

  Tuesday, April 16, 2047.

  The 120 new ninth graders at Umesato Junior High, including Kuroyukihime and Megumi, were in Okinawa for a six-night, seven-day school trip. It was still just the third day, which meant that the following day would finally be the turning point.

  They had needed to choose their itineraries in advance from two plans, and Kuroyukihime and Megumi had registered for the Naha-Henoko–Yoron Island–Naha course. The white beach and the emerald-green sea spreading out before their eyes at the moment was Henoko Beach, in the center of the southern part of Okinawa’s main island. Thirty years or so earlier, there had apparently been a huge uproar about whether to move the American military base in Futenma here, but in the end, a super-large-scale semisubmersible megafloat had been built in Kin Bay, a little ways off, and the matter had been settled with a proposal to move the majority of airfield functions there.

  The silver shadows that cut across the blue sky from time to time were likely American military planes taking off from that base. Compared with the new Self-Defense Force unmanned battle craft they normally saw in the sky in Tokyo, these were relatively large, but because they were at such high altitudes, the noise was barely noticeable. It seemed that their Umesato classmates, who had been frolicking on the beach until earlier, had left on the sea kayak tour, so now only the sound of the waves coming and going reached their ears between pockets of silence.

  Kuroyukihime took another sip of her flat lemon juice, flicked away a drop that fell on the top of her black bikini, and sighed quietly. Four more days.

  It wasn’t that the trip was particularly boring, or that she hadn’t wanted to come. She understood the objective fact that your junior high school class trip was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and in light of her slightly complicated family situation, she wouldn’t be able to go on a real trip again for some time. If things went badly, she might not even get to go on her high school trip.

  Which was why she should be working hard to make every possible memory and fill up all the photo and video space on her Neurolinker so that she would regret nothing later—in her head, she knew that, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t throw herself wholeheartedly into trip mode. The reason was obvious. Because at minimum, twice a day, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking, I want to hurry back to Tokyo. I want to go home and talk with him like we always do.

  And it was also clear that Megumi Wakamiya, in the deck chair to the right with her eyes shut and a pleased look on her face, had seen right through to this inner turmoil.

  Kuroyukihime slowly inhaled air that smelled of ocean and flowers and then offered quietly, “Megumi.”

  Her friend’s eyelids slid upward, and she cocked her head in a questioning way.

  “Sorry.” She dipped her head lightly. “Making you look out for me. You actually wanted to go out in the kayak, didn’t you?”

  “Totally fine. This is my job, too, after all.”

  “Y-your job?”

  “It’s right there in the Umesato student council regulations. The job of the secretary is, one: create meeting minutes; and, two: look out for the moody vice president.”

  “N-no way. You’re lying.” She pursed her lips tightly.

  Megumi laughed delightedly before turning her eyes out toward the horizon. “Honestly, it’s fine. I love being luxurious with time, all laid-back like this. I mean, you know that, Hime.”

  She did often sprawl on the sofa in the student council office and stare out into the courtyard, but that wasn’t so much her being laid-back as her racking her brains for work to put in the literature club magazine, which she was also a member of. Which meant that Megumi had friends in clubs other than Kuroyukihime, and yet she had shut them out completely to stay by Kuroyukihime’s side during the whole trip.

  “Sorry. Thanks, Megumi,” she murmured once more, in a voice that was almost soundless. Inwardly, she added, From the bottom of my heart, I’m so grateful that I have a friend like you waiting for me in a place unconnected with that world.

  She had long been aware that she had an intensely melancholic side.

  Back when the firs
t Nega Nebulus had been still around, she had always had so many friends close to her, starting with Fuko Kurashima (Sky Raker) and Utai Shinomiya (Ardor Maiden). When she suddenly wanted to talk to someone in the middle of the night, if she dived into the closed net for the Legion that Graphite Edge, one of the Four Elements, had set up, she would definitely run across someone’s avatar—and then they would do a normal duel, or join a Gallery, or head over to the Unlimited Neutral Field and hunt Enemies, or do some quest or another; she had plenty of ways to forget her sadness.

  But in the week that started with that blood-soaked night and leading up to the tragic events at the Castle a little over two years earlier, she had lost everything.

  She had been able to stay disconnected from the global net for two long years in order to hide herself from the waves of assassins sent by the Six Kings (although to be more accurate, the seat of the Red King had been vacant for a while after the incident) not so much due to her positive will that she would restart things again one day, but rather, due in large part to the fact that she was afraid those old bonds had been severed completely. However, even in her last stronghold, the Umesato local net, late last summer, a mysterious hunter named Cyan Pile had appeared and forced her hand.

  Should she release the seal on her duel avatar Black Lotus and counterattack with all her might? Or should she use the final card remaining to her and exercise her copy/install right to seek out a new bond?

  If she had chosen the former, it would have been an easy thing to cut down Cyan Pile in a single blow. But if, as a result, Pile abandoned the hunt himself, she feared that might bring about the worst-case scenario in which he sold her real information to the kings.

  Thus, Kuroyukihime had wagered on a one-in-a-million miracle. She would seek out a student at Umesato Junior High who might have the compatibility to install Brain Burst, make them her first and last “child,” and together they’d crack Pile in the real.

  The task had been extremely difficult. With her privileges as student council vice president, she had accessed the school database and scrutinized the records of all the students in the school, but there was no way she could know affinity as a Burst Linker from grades and gym class results.

  However, one day, for no real reason, she had opened the high score list for the game corner in the local net and discovered a number that stunned her. A score that stuck out from all the other games—literally, an order of magnitude greater. Half doubting its reality, she had tried the virtual squash game herself, but she couldn’t score even half of the 2,630,000 that “nickname: HAL” had produced.

  She had half forgotten her initial purpose as she wondered just who this student could be and started monitoring the local net. Two days later, the person who had shown up in the squash corner—deserted even at lunchtime—was a very round, pink pig-shaped avatar. Impossible. It can’t be. Kuroyukihime had watched from behind an object, while before her eyes, the pink pig had gripped the racket and hit the ball as if trying to banish some gloom.

  After witnessing him beat his own high score a few minutes later, she had murmured without realizing it, Eureka. I found you.

  The pink pig HAL, aka the boy Haruyuki Arita, cleared the compatibility check for Brain Burst just as Kuroyukihime had believed he would, and the silver duel avatar Silver Crow was generated from deep within his heart.

  In the beginning, all she wanted him to do was check the direction of the guide cursor when Cyan Pile attacked, but he displayed ability and possibility far greater than anything she had expected. Or maybe that was inevitable. Because the boy Arita had a reaction speed that left Kuroyukihime, with all her vast combat experience in the Accelerated World, unceremoniously in the lurch even before he became a Burst Linker.

  Now, he was not only her lone child and the first member of the new Nega Nebulus, but also an incredibly precious person. In proportion with his abilities, he was hurt extremely easily, and her desire to protect and soothe him was always mixed with the desire to serve him, given that he would likely reach such great heights one day as to surpass even her and the other kings. Something deep within her throbbed painfully. If that was dependence, then so be it. Because he had put a stop to the cold drops of sadness that had fallen endlessly on the surface of her heart these last two years.

  However, because of this, Kuroyukihime was left unable to fully enjoy a weeklong school trip. Naturally, if she video-called like she had earlier, she could see his face whenever she wanted, and on a dive call, it was even possible for their avatars to touch, but she couldn’t help but feel an inexplicable forlornness at their physical separation—1,600 kilometers in the real world. Wasn’t he struggling all on his own when she wasn’t there, he who was so easily hurt and yet so obstinate? She always ended up thinking like this.

  “I haven’t seen that look on your face in a while, Hime.” A voice sounded abruptly, followed by a slender finger gently stroking the hair on her forehead.

  When she opened her eyes, which she had closed at some point, Megumi was leaning forward out of the neighboring deck chair. Her gentle smile was right there next to Kuroyukihime.

  “And what look is that?” she asked in return.

  There was a slight pause before an unexpected answer came: “That look that says you want to go back. Not to Tokyo…but to some world that’s not here.”

  Kuroyukihime involuntarily gasped. “Megumi.”

  She had confirmed that Megumi Wakamiya was not a Burst Linker two years earlier when they met as new students. In fact, one major factor in her decision to go to Umesato Junior High was because there were no Burst Linkers in the student body or among the students taking the entrance exam. Otherwise, it would not have fulfilled its role as a “cocoon” to hide her from the assassins of the Six Kings.

  Staring into Kuroyukihime’s wide-open eyes from a mere fifteen centimeters away, Megumi announced even more surprisingly, “I know you have another world that I can’t see. And that maybe the real Hime is there on the other side.”

  “The real…me.”

  “Yup. I mean, ever since we met, you’ve had this look on your face like you’re a little lost kid. Until last fall…until you met him.”

  At this, Kuroyukihime’s face grew hot. Unconsciously, she brought the lemon-juice bottle she held up to her cheek.

  “Me too, you know,” Megumi said, chin in hands next to her, her own eyes growing hazy. “I get that feeling, a little.”

  “…You do?”

  “Yeah. There was this book I loved when I was really, really little. I read it over and over every day, and I still never got tired of it. Every time I went to the world of that book, I would meet someone new or have new adventures. But…at some point, the book disappeared. And now, I can’t remember its title or what it said—nothing.” Here, she closed her mouth for a moment, and her eyes met Kuroyukihime’s as she smiled a little. “Maybe the reason I joined the literature club was so I could re-create the book myself.”

  “Re-create…Do you think you could?”

  “Not a chance.” She shook her head and laughed out loud. It was Megumi’s usual kind laughter, but for the first time, Kuroyukihime realized there was a touch of sadness within it.

  “Sometimes…I try to write down the images in the fragments that come back to me every so often, but when I do, it’s not right. The only thing I remember properly is that on the first page, there was a spell to keep reading the rest. I just know that as long as I can’t remember that spell, I won’t be able to get to the world of the book.”

  “Megumi…” Unsure of what to say in response, Kuroyukihime simply hesitated. The words You’ll remember someday would have been easy. But she suddenly wondered if she had any right to offer such platitudes when, in fact, she could readily access her ethereal world and Megumi could not.

  The silence was broken after a mere three seconds. Grinning her usual bright smile this time, Megumi leaned forward with some force. “This is no good! I’m supposed to be watching out for you, bu
t this is just the opposite. It’s because we’re in this dark shadow.” She reached out and pressed a button on the umbrella pole. The silver screen rotated to wind itself up.

  The blazing sun that poured down on them instantly dazzled Kuroyukihime’s eyes, and Megumi took the opportunity to flip her with both hands.

  “Ah! Wh-what are you doing?!”

  “Come on! Don’t fight me. I’m going to rub some oil on your back, Hime.”

  “I—I can do that myself!” She kicked and slapped, but Megumi’s fingers pressed down on an acupuncture point or a pressure point or something, and she couldn’t get away.

  “And look, the stimulation might make you grow.”

  “Wh-where?!”

  “Ha-ha-ha! It’s obvious.”

  As Megumi spoke, a viscous liquid dribbled down onto Kuroyukihime’s back, followed by the merciless onslaught of Megumi’s hands. With absolutely zero experience in having another person apply sunscreen for her, the sensation was so new that Kuroyukihime involuntarily cried out, “Neeyaaah!”

  A shriek that Arita would never, ever be allowed to hear rang out across Henoko Beach.

  2

  Three PM.

  Kuroyukihime and Megumi joined up with the students returning from kayaking and headed back to their hotel. In their shared twin room, they took turns showering and then changed into their street clothes. With Kuroyukihime in a black camisole and three-quarter-length leggings, and Megumi in a pale-yellow dress, they headed out for a walk and perhaps some shopping along the way before supper.

  Camp Schwab, the American military base formerly in Henoko, had been downsized a couple decades earlier, and the area it once occupied had been redeveloped as a large-scale marine resort. Both sides of the street from the hotel to the beach were lined with colorful shops, offering a taste of the unfettered chaos of a southern country. In the previous century, junior high students on a school trip would never have been permitted to walk around without a guide in a place like this, but the power of the social camera network that blanketed the area ensured a high level of public order.