The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

  This time, however, he couldn’t rely on anyone else. Because, if he faced them in the Accelerated World, Haruyuki might indiscriminately attack them. Given this risk, the act of diving into the Unlimited Neutral Field itself was full of danger. He couldn’t say that he wouldn’t run across someone there who didn’t want to fight. Maybe it would be better to pull the Neurolinker off his neck and smash it or throw it into the fountain. Destroying the installed BB program itself might be the only way to bury the Armor of Catastrophe…

  And then a pair of neatly lined-up shoes came into Haruyuki’s field of view ahead of him, as he headed for the entrance with his head hanging. They weren’t new, but the black loafers had been well cared for. White socks, slender calves. A plaid pleated skirt swinging slightly above small knees.

  Someone, probably a girl, was standing in Haruyuki’s path—in other words, smack in the middle of the central hallway of the shopping mall. She might have been manipulating her virtual desktop, but it was still a serious violation of etiquette. But of course, he did not have the nerve to just charge forward and shove her aside, so he changed course to the left without looking up at the other girl’s face.

  But, shockingly, the black loafers also took a step to the left and continued to block his path.

  Finally, feeling mildly irritated, Haruyuki shifted again, to the right. But the owner of the shoes also moved in the same direction. The distance between them was cut down to a meter, and he was forced to stop.

  “Excuse me,” Haruyuki whispered, stubbornly not looking up. “I’m coming through here.”

  Ah! I’m sorry! was naturally the reaction he was expecting. But…there was a bit of a pause, and then a fairly low voice said something beyond unexpected:

  “I. Won’t let you.”

  Huh?! Things having reached this point, there was no way that even Haruyuki could help but straighten his rounded back.

  As he lifted his eyes, the mysterious path-blocking girl came into full view in pieces. Above the plaid skirt: an ivory school cardigan. At the neckline, a ribbon of the same pattern as the skirt. If it was a school uniform, it was a fairly stylish design. Over it, a smallish shoulder bag hung diagonally. The girl was probably in junior high, but she was quite slender and small. Thin arms were spread out at an angle of about thirty degrees; she was extremely serious about blocking Haruyuki.

  Even more dumbfounded, he finally looked at his opponent’s face. Like the voice and the uniform, it was unfamiliar. Her features were sharply put together, with something boyish about them, and her hair was short and slightly unkempt. Haruyuki was bad at remembering faces, but still, there was very little doubt that this was the first time he’d ever seen this girl. However, he couldn’t definitively declare this to be true, seeing as how he’d only looked at her face for a moment before reflexively sliding his eyes away.

  And that was because the mysterious girl had downturned eyes wet with tears, on the verge of spilling down her cheeks.

  There was no reason for him to even try to figure out why a junior high girl on the verge of tears was not letting him pass in the middle of a mall full of shoppers; the whole thing made no sense at all. Haruyuki somehow managed to turn off his “surprised” switch before he went into full-on, frozen shock.

  “Um,” he whispered, “I—I think you have the wrong person. Excuse me, I’m in a hurry, so…” And then he changed course for the third time, trying to slip by on the left.

  The half-crying girl reached out to grab his wrist with unexpected force. “I don’t have. The wrong person,” she told him in an even thinner voice. “I can’t. Let you go.”

  “Huh?! Wh-why…I haven’t done anything!” Haruyuki said, hurriedly, feeling the eyes of passersby finally turning on them.

  The girl’s response to this was further denial.

  “No. You did. You. Saved. Me,” she announced haltingly, tears building up in her single-lidded eyes.

  “I’m. Ash. Roller.”

  4

  Many abilities were required of those who would be Burst Linkers, but the most important was the ability to react to a situation.

  Anything could happen in the middle of a duel, even if your opponent was a duel avatar you knew well. Your chances at victory in an unimaginable situation were slim if you didn’t react quickly. The chance to collect information and act. You could leverage the performance of your avatar or you could be killed, depending on whether or not you could make this process happen in a short time.

  The foundation for Silver Crow’s speed, his greatest strength, was Haruyuki’s own reaction speed. And it wasn’t as though he had only recently developed the ability to race through a moment of paralysis during a duel.

  However…

  Now Haruyuki’s thought clock dropped to below a single hertz, and he could do nothing other than gape, eyes and mouth wide open.

  Ash Roller. So…Wait. Who?

  It’s…Ash. He answered his own lagging thoughts. Rides the antique American motorcycle. With the skull helmet. All shrieking with laughter, thinks he’s so hot.

  Huh? This is what’s inside Ash? This quiet girl?

  Haruyuki used up a full ten seconds before finally processing even a fragment of this new information, but there his thoughts stopped once more. For an instant at least, his own predicament flew completely out of his head, and in the blankness there, a tiny motorcycle zoomed past within his mind. And yet he still stood frozen in the middle of the crowded shopping mall.

  The girl with the teary eyes gave his wrist another tug. “Um,” she said quietly. “Let’s. Go somewhere. Else.”

  Essentially brain-dead, Haruyuki allowed himself to be led to the large parking area on Basement 2 of the mall. They cut through the orderly rows of EVs, and a familiar compact car appeared. Fresh canary yellow, Italian five-door hatchback—the beloved car of Sky Raker, aka Fuko Kurasaki (or, more precisely, Ash’s mother).

  The girl apparently had a remote key because she made a quick gesture with her right hand, and the doors were unlocked, accompanied by the flashing of the car’s turn signals. She pulled the rear right door open and pushed Haruyuki into the backseat before sliding in after him.

  He could take the fact that the girl had been given the key to this car as proof that she knew Fuko. Still, he simply could not process the claim that the junior high school girl with the messy short hair plopped down beside him was the Ash Roller, and he sat there emptily. In comparison, it had all felt so much more real when he learned that the little girl who had slipped into his house under the pretense of being his relative Tomoko Saito was actually the second Red King, Scarlet Rain.

  However, he couldn’t stay frozen like this forever. Seven minutes had already passed since he flew out of his house in his sloppy T-shirt and long shorts. He had eight more minutes before the emergency lock function of the Arita house automatically unlocked and released Kuroyukihime and the other four, after which they would no doubt come running after him.

  Finding him in the enormous condo complex when he had cut his Neurolinker off from the network would probably be difficult, but they had Chiyuri and Takumu on their side. When the three of them were little, they had played countless games of tag and hide-and-seek with this building as their staging ground, and Haruyuki’s win ratio was far and away the lowest of all three. With Chiyuri’s weird animal instincts, once they got around to the ice cream of Enjiya, they would sniff out his location in minutes. Which meant if he really intended to settle the situation by himself, then he had at best ten minutes before he needed to be outside the condo.

  Having succeed in rebooting his brain with this little detour, Haruyuki glanced over at the girl, still sniffling beside him, and managed to open his mouth.

  “Ummmm, so…what you said before, Ash Roller? So you’re, like, Ash’s friend or messenger…or something?” he asked first, betting on the unlikely possibility that he had misheard her before.

  But clutching the white handkerchief she had pulled out at some point in
both hands, the girl made a clear gesture of denial, shaking her soft hair. She hung her face, which was for some reason a little redder now, and in a voice that threatened to disappear, oozing shyness, she said, “I’m Ash.”

  His thoughts threatened to shut down once more. But he still couldn’t actually believe it.

  In the expansive Accelerated World, there were people for whom the images of their duel avatars and their real selves were far apart. Haruyuki himself could be said to be one of them. If you only knew the slender-to-the-extreme body of Silver Crow, you wouldn’t really be able to imagine that this rotund eighth-grade boy was the true identity of that duel avatar.

  But that sort of thing happened mostly with external appearance. There wasn’t much divergence in the tone of voice or the way a person held themselves—their “spirit,” as it were. Burst Linkers Haruyuki knew in the real—Kuroyukihime and the other members of Nega Nebulus, Niko and Pard from Prominence, and even that crafty Dusk Taker—were no exception.

  In contrast, the girl beside him and Ash Roller had not a single point in common—or at least, that’s how it looked. The words they used, their gestures, their personalities were so different, they could only be called polar opposites. And no matter how he looked at it, that biker was a male-type avatar, wasn’t it? And in Brain Burst, if the person was a girl, then they would definitely get a female type…

  “Oh!” Haruyuki let out a small cry as he remembered a certain scene. He threw his body back to the right and stared straight on for the first time at the teary face of the girl.

  She shrank back slightly even as she returned his gaze, her face housing a soft weakness and coolness at the same time. She was indeed a girl, but her appearance gave the faint impression of a nerdy boy. Her face did somehow resemble the “bare face” of Ash Roller hidden beneath the skull-patterned helmet shield.

  “…You…really…but why…” Haruyuki asked an entirely too vague question.

  The teary-eyed girl replied in action rather than words. She opened the small shoulder bag on the knees of her skirt and tucked away the handkerchief before pulling out something else in its place. Right and left arms folded up, dark metallic gray—a Neurolinker.

  Huh? he thought, as he shifted his gaze to the girl’s slender neck. Already equipped there was a cute pastel-green quantum communication terminal. Given that she had unlocked the car earlier with a wave of her right hand, it would naturally be strange if there wasn’t.

  But then, here came his second question.

  Neurolinkers were mobile devices in a line descended from the old cell phones and smart phones, but that was not all they were. They were business cards, wallets, personal identification. The particular brain waves of the user and the particular ID burned into the core chip were linked; just by wearing it, you proved who you were. So that ID was, for all intents and purposes, a “citizen number.”

  Put another way, the Neurolinker was a “tagged necklace” the government gave citizens. Reinforcing that, ownership of multiple Neurolinkers was prohibited by law. Of course, there were several ways to get a hold of a second or third terminal, but there was no point in getting just the machine, given that only one key core chip was issued per person, and the chips could be transferred (i.e., to a new model) only at a ward office or government-approved shop. Even the Kuroyukihime had only one Neurolinker. If she had had two, she wouldn’t have had to stay disconnected from the global net for over two years in order to hide from the assassins of the Six Kings.

  For all these reasons, Haruyuki was honestly stunned at the second Neurolinker the girl pulled out. “I-is that…yours?” he asked hoarsely. “Y-you can use it?”

  “I. Can,” the girl replied, tilting her head at a very slight angle. “But. It’s. Not mine. This was my. Older brother’s. Neurolinker.”

  “I-it was your older brother’s?” he parroted, dumbfounded, and the mysterious girl nodded sharply, turning her entire body toward him on the leather seat. However, they were inside a car, so this essentially amounted to her twisting her torso, inevitably yanking up the hem of her skirt to reveal a fair amount of her pale legs.

  Even in this increasingly complex situation, Haruyuki, being Haruyuki, could only freeze his eyeballs unnaturally in panic. But the girl seemed unconcerned with his reaction and snapped her back up straight while taking several deep breaths. It was almost as though the girl was just as nervous in this situation as Haruyuki. Placing the gray Neurolinker on her lap, she squeezed both hands tightly as if telling herself, You can do it.

  Finally, she took another breath before turning eternally teary eyes back toward Haruyuki. “I—My name is. Rin Kusakabe,” she said, in a clear voice. At the same time, she made a small gesture with her right hand, and a pale-green rectangle appeared in his field of view. A name tag sent via an ad hoc connection. The kanji characters displayed there read RIN KUSAKABE. She was born in 2033, making her an eighth grader in junior high, just like Haruyuki.

  “Uh, um, I’m Haruyuki Arita.” Reflexively, he gave his name as he pushed the button to send his name tag in return. The girl, Rin, dropped her eyes to glance at the tag and smiled the tiniest bit, the first time since their chance meeting.

  Pressed into an even more panicked state, he gave voice semi-automatically to a question not high up on his list of priorities. “Th-th-that reminds me. In the mall before, how did you know I was Silver Crow?”

  “That…A few minutes after. I burst out in the car. I got a voice call from Master. Your picture was attached. And she ordered me to. Do whatever it took to catch you. Before you left the condo.”

  “Master? You mean Sky Raker, right?” he confirmed, and then his brain took a shortcut, moving sideways.

  The combination didn’t entirely make sense. On the surface at least, Fuko Kurasaki was basically a graceful, upper middle-class high school student, and yet she was parent to the arrogant and insolent fin de siècle rider. From that point of view, the girl before him now no doubt had much more in common with Fuko, but this didn’t answer the fundamental question.

  As Haruyuki fought the urge to hold his head in his hands, Rin Kusakabe took the metallic-gray Neurolinker in her hands once more. Each time she moved, a faint floral scent wafted through the car, decelerating his thoughts. When she started speaking again, Haruyuki hurriedly sat up straighter.

  “Um. I’ll start. From the beginning. Why. I became. A Burst Linker.”

  “My brother’s name was Rinta, and he was an ICGP racer.”

  This was Rin’s beginning.

  ICGP was a category of two-wheeled—in other words, motorcycle—racing. IC stood for “internal combustion.” In an age where electric vehicles had conquered even the world of motorsports, this was, to be blunt, an old-fashioned race, a lingering obsession with gasoline-engine vehicles that had no AI controls.

  Nevertheless, compared with the strong, silent, and smart impression of electric racing machines, gasoline vehicles had an appeal that was hard to deny, with their roaring exhausts and wild spins. It wouldn’t be a surprise if this category of racing, under attack for years as a symbol of environmental destruction, disappeared at any time, but Haruyuki himself had pushed back his sleepiness to watch the midnight broadcasts any number of times.

  “My brother was. Six years older than me. And I know I’m the one saying it, but he. Was a talented rider. Two years ago, if he did well domestically. He’d get to go to Europe. It was a chance he embraced.” As she falteringly told the story, Rin’s eyes welled up with transparent droplets once more. “But in the last race. From the inside. He was hit by another car. I was there cheering for him. He was. Crushed right in front of me. Fortunately, they saved his life. But he’s been unconscious ever since. This whole time. Even when they. Force him into a full dive with a medical Neurolinker. There’s only. The faintest reaction…”

  Unsure of how to respond, Haruyuki simply continued to stare into Rin’s wet eyes.

  In EV races, where AI controls were the rule, there were
essentially no accidents caused by one car touching another. This meant viewers did not get to see thrilling passes or the neck-and-neck fights, sparks shooting out from the wheels of both cars, so this was a selling point for ICGP and IC Formula, which had exactly these elements. But it was inevitable that the number of serious accidents was an order of magnitude higher.

  Rin blinked several times and calmed her breathing before continuing, “For the last two years. My brother’s been in a large hospital. In Shibuya. I live in Egota, in Nakano Ward. But I chose a private. Junior high in Shibuya.”

  “So you could go visit him?” Haruyuki asked in a small voice, and Rin nodded sharply.

  “The doctor said. His chances of recovery are higher when. He can hear the voices of his family. And have us hold his hand in the real world. I stop at the hospital every day. On my way home from school. I wanted to go every day during summer vacation, too. But I felt shy about asking. For a bus pass just for that. And then, last summer, in the hospital cafeteria, his primary doctor. Suggested I work there part-time just for summer vacation.”

  “I—I get it.”

  With the easing of restrictions on hiring minors in the revision of the labor standards, junior high school students were also now able to work the part-time jobs they had previously been forbidden, although the hours they could work were limited. Still, Haruyuki had never once thought about working to earn money himself, and he unconsciously let out a sigh of admiration.

  “Wow. I mean, working the whole summer vacation for your brother’s sake…”

  “No.” Eyes still damp with the ever-present tears, Rin smiled very faintly as she shook her head. “I’m just clumsy at work. Last summer alone, I broke ten plates. And glasses.”

  “Y-you did?”

  “And not just. That. Once, I dumped ice water. On a patient’s lap.”

  “Y-you…did?”

  “Fortunately, the patient was very nice. A little older, but a junior high student like me. And our schools are close to each other, too. We got closer after that. We talk about where we’ll go to high school. About my brother, all kinds of things.”