To this, he had no immediate reply. If you were going to duel in open, public spaces, then the most basic of baby steps was to move once you were done. But for Haruyuki, when the duel was too superheated, a famed contest, he had the bad habit of spacing out and replaying the fight in his mind after he burst out. Apparently, he had somehow been perfectly picked out there by Rin, through the window of the bus.
“But—then, now— If you knew my real, why…someone like me?”
“I mean. You have. Wings. Not just your duel avatar. You in the real world, too. You do. I can see. Those wings so clearly.” Rin’s hand, still wrapped around Haruyuki, slowly stroked the center of his back.
A sensation that was hard to put into words shot through him from the tips of his toes to the crown of his head, causing him to hold his breath.
A bewitching smile rose up on Rin’s face as tears continued to drip from her eyes onto his neck. “Ever since that day,” she said, “I. Decided. If…if I ever got to meet you in the real, I would make sure. To tell you. That I like you. That I’ve always liked you. Ever since you were in level one. I’m glad. I got to tell you. I’m glad. In the end, we got to be. Like this, alone together.”
“Huh? I-in the end?” Haruyuki asked, dumbfounded.
This girl, Rin Kusakabe, who he had basically never met before, sighed heavily before making both her face and voice resolute. “The Armor of Catastrophe you summoned. I’ll get rid of it,” she announced. “With my body. With my heart. I’ll get rid of it.”
“That…What does that mean?”
“I’ll take. All of your anger and hatred. It’s okay. As long as it’s you. I’m not scared, no matter what’s done to me.”
Rin pulled her hand away from Haruyuki’s back and slipped the pastel-green Neurolinker off her neck. Without a moment’s delay, her other hand was putting on the metallic-gray Neurolinker—originally her older brother’s—she had been holding all that time.
No sooner had the arm lock gently taken hold of Rin’s slender neck than her empty right hand flashed. One end of the slim XSB cable she’d likely pulled out of her bag went into her own Neurolinker. The other went into Haruyuki’s.
She didn’t give him the time to say anything. The crimson wired connection warning floated up in his view, and the moment it disappeared, Rin murmured a brief command, her lips so close they were practically touching his.
“Burst Link.”
All the chaos and confusion, and the bittersweet throbbing he couldn’t put a name to, were swept away in the sharp skreeee of his thoughts accelerating.
5
HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!!
The flaming text sprang to life in front of his eyes and then disappeared, bringing virtual darkness, and Haruyuki had a strong hunch about what stage would appear before him. Eventually, the soles of his metallic avatar’s feet touched the hard earth. He waited until the sensation of descending had stopped before gently picking himself up.
He had, of course, not moved from the expansive underground parking area on B2 of his own condo building. But the real world’s multicolored rows of neatly arranged EVs were crushed, burned, rusted, decaying. Even the yellow compact car that had been Fuko’s baby, enshrined to his left, was a miserable sight, the hood peeled away, small flames flickering in the exposed engine compartment.
The duel had only just started, so it wasn’t as if someone had destroyed them. Looking down, he saw that the concrete at his feet was also covered in hairline cracks, and around him, the thick pillars and walls were crumbling, exposing the rebar. If he went outside, the building itself would probably also be half-destroyed, and he wouldn’t be able to get back inside. This image of “destruction completed” was the true nature of the Century End stage Haruyuki had sensed was coming.
And then…
Across from him in the gloom, some twenty meters away, he heard a throaty mechanical roar. This was immediately followed by the irregular rumble characteristic of a V-twin engine idling. A round headlight flicked on, and a warm, yellowish light illuminated his avatar.
Reflexively looking down at his own limbs, Haruyuki found there the smooth, slender armor of Silver Crow and let out a small sigh of relief. The Enhanced Armament Disaster wasn’t the type that was constantly equipped, so it wouldn’t appear unless he used a voice command to call it. Or it shouldn’t, anyway…
“Ngh!” But in the next instant, Haruyuki was made painfully aware of the naïveté of his own outlook.
Silver Crow was not entirely as he had been. Normally, the ten fingers on his hands were so slender as to be ill-suited to fistfighting, but they were now talons with tips tapering like knives. He had three talons on each of his feet as well, and these dug deep into the concrete. When he hurriedly touched his head with one hand, he felt the original round form of his helmet, but protrusions like the vestiges of a visor stuck up from his temples.
So the Armor had indeed already stepped out from the realm of simple Enhanced Armament and was trying to fuse with his duel avatar itself. If Haruyuki’s emotions or actions provided any trigger, it would explode and, in the blink of an eye, he would transform into a rampaging destroyer.
The instant he realized this and his body began trembling, he heard it growl, quietly but ferociously, somewhere deep in his back. Was it beginning to wake up from its brief sleep, sensing battle and slaughter?
Hey, Beast, he addressed the monster earnestly. Just sit still and be good for this one fight at least!
Once he had finished confirming to some degree who and what he was at that moment, Haruyuki started talking to the headlight in front of him. “Um, Ash?”
The silhouette of the rider that popped up beyond the intense beam of light stayed silent, seeming to simply stare at Haruyuki. The burning remains of cars around them occasionally lit the skull-patterned helmet shield with an orange light.
I can’t believe…it’s actually a girl under that skull. And I can’t believe…she told me that she likes me.
In the fourteen years or so that Haruyuki had been alive, this was the second time a member of the opposite sex had seriously confessed feelings for him. The first had, of course, been his Legion Master and swordmaster, his parent, Kuroyukihime. As she’d moved to protect him from an out-of-control car charging toward them, she had said it: “Haruyuki. I like you.”
At the time—no, still, even now, he couldn’t completely banish the question of why someone like Kuroyukihime would pick someone like him. Of course, he was so happy when she said that, he practically floated off up to heaven, and he naturally also really liked her. But in his heart, he could see that his own feelings were something akin to worship or respect and admiration. But because he had been in so-called self-restraint mode—right now he was still a short, pudgy, cowardly crybaby, but if he someday became a person worthy of her, then he would definitely tell her—Haruyuki himself had actually never told Kuroyukihime how he felt.
And then a few minutes earlier, in the cramped, closed space of the car, for the second time in his life, a girl had told Haruyuki she liked him. Rin Kusakabe had said, in her real voice, allowing no suspicion of any electronic fraud, and without the slightest reserve, “I like you.”
Not only did he not have any idea how to react, he wasn’t even clear on how he should take that. He just knew that transforming from his real body into his avatar through the sudden direct duel had succeeded in cooling his head, albeit slightly.
Inside Ash Roller was a girl named Rin. And this Rin had sincerely confessed her crush on him.
He would set these two points aside for the time being. At that moment, what he needed to be thinking about, first and foremost, were Rin’s last words. She said she would erase the Armor of Catastrophe with her body. But as far as Haruyuki knew, Ash Roller didn’t have any kind of purification-type ability. So did that mean that, just as the sentence that followed—“I’ll take. All of your anger and hatred.”—indicated, she was planning to suppress the destroyer Chrome Disaster by
giving her own self to the Armor as an offering? Maybe she was hoping to take responsibility in this form for creating the trigger for Disaster’s return.
“Ash—I mean, Rin.” Because they were in a direct duel field where there was no Gallery, Haruyuki dared to utter his opponent’s real name. “I’m really happy you want to help me. But you don’t have to feel responsible for the Armor of Catastrophe. This armor—this Beast—has been inside me for a long time, for a few months now. I just got carried away by my emotions and summoned it.” He glanced down at the sinister tapering talons of his right hand and went to continue speaking, but he was cut off by the heavy yet calm roar of the engine.
Vrrrr! The internal combustion engine shuddered, and the output it generated slowly rotated the fat rear tire. From the darkness ahead of him, the massive American motorcycle revealed itself. The slender rider, a knight on an iron horse, leisurely placed both hands on the handlebars, the skull face hanging so deeply Haruyuki couldn’t see the expression on it.
“Rin…” Haruyuki tried to call out to her once more.
In that instant, the black leather gloves clutched the handlebars tightly. While the right hand twisted the throttle, the left dropped the clutch. The engine roared, an explosive howl, and the rear tire spun furiously, sending up plumes of white smoke.
“R-Rin?” Dumbfounded, Haruyuki called her name for the third time. But he didn’t have the time to say anything more. From the startlingly close distance of ten meters, the massive American motorcycle charged forward, front wheel lifting slightly.
To his left, Fuko’s car. On his right, an enormous SUV. With nowhere to run, Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot. And wham! Mercilessly, the bike knocked him down—more precisely, sent him flying.
Not knowing which way was even up anymore and still without the mental reserves to remember to take up a passive posture, he hit the ground on his back several meters to the rear. Crash! Sparks shooting up as he bounced, Haruyuki saw the gray tire closing in on him once more.
Wham! Crash!
Wham! Crash!
The combination of the sound of collision and the sound of his fall echoed another two times in the vast underground parking area. The third time, instead of landing on his butt, Haruyuki sprawled out on his back, arms and legs splayed, head spinning from the physical impact and the mental shock.
When the silhouette appeared looming above him in the sky, he cried out, “Wh-whoa!”
But then the enormous, descending rubber ring—the front wheel of the motorcycle—slammed into his stomach. Pressed down by the machine’s overwhelming weight, he couldn’t actually move, although he could flail his arms and legs frantically. Thanks to the three direct hits and the current crushing, Haruyuki’s health gauge had already decreased nearly 40 percent.
She says she’s always liked me and then she treats me like this?! Or does she take after Master and this is some kind of violent expression of love?! These thoughts raced through Haruyuki’s mind a little late in the game, while a meter and a half or so above him…
The skull-faced rider straddled the seat of the American bike, arms crossed, and spoke in a hoarse voice that both did and did not sound like the real-world Rin Kusakabe.
“You scrawny little craaaow…You dare lay a hand on my baby siiiiiiis!”
“Wh-whaaaaaaaaa—?!” Haruyuki shouted.
As if he could sit there and not shout it.
The real-world person moving the duel avatar that leaned over with the machine, flames of fury burning brightly in the eye sockets of the skull face, was supposed to be the sister, not the brother. Hadn’t Rin said that? That her brother, the young ICGP rider Rinta Kusakabe, had been in a coma in a hospital bed ever since a crash two years earlier?
In which case, naturally, it was impossible for him to dive into the Accelerated World as a Burst Linker. And to start with, it was definitely the sister, Rin Kusakabe, who had directed and accelerated with him after falling on top of him in the backseat. Of course, he hadn’t actually confirmed through whatever means that she was really the junior high school girl he saw before him—and it wasn’t as though Rin herself had declared that she was a girl—but still, in this situation, it was just too absurd that Ash Roller would be denouncing him for “laying a hand on his baby sis!”
“Uh, uh, y-y-you’re Rin…right?” Haruyuki asked with a groan, enduring the weight of the front wheel as it made the Armor on his chest squeal and creak.
To which the century-end rider’s response was, “‘You’re Riiiiin’? Damn, man. Who said you could go calling my baby sis by her first name?! Way too soon for second names—nah, third names! Daaaaaamn!”
The opposite of “first name” is “last name.”
This was normally where he’d toss off a retort like that, but this was definitely not the time for that. The anger he saw in the rider far surpassed the domain of role-play. Somehow, the personality inside Ash Roller was clearly not the sister, Rin, but the brother, Rinta. So Haruyuki figured he should assume that all the fights in the Accelerated World, the cursing, and at times, the talking had all been with the older brother.
So then that meant…this was a so-called split personality? When the girl Rin Kusakabe dove into the Accelerated World, she switched over to a second personality produced from memories—recollections connected with her brother?
While these thoughts developed in his mind at super-high speed, his health gauge was squeaking down to the halfway mark from the large load damage and finally turned yellow. Instantly, Haruyuki heard, in the center of his back, it howling once more with displeasure. Uh-oh. If this kept up, the Beast he had managed to put to sleep for a while after rampaging against Iron Pound and Green Grandé in the Unlimited Neutral Field would wake up. Before the duel, Rin had stated her intention to appease the Armor of Catastrophe by putting her own self forward, but he couldn’t actually let her do that. First, he needed to escape this crushed state and get into a situation where he could at least talk with Ash.
“Uh, uh, uuuuuuuh, Ash—No, big brother!!” Haruyuki called out almost in a trance, as he struggled to try to lift the massive tire with both hands. “Th-th-th-th-that, Rin—I mean, your sister! Um, uhhh…”
If the personality of the girl existed inside the century-end rider above his head, then maybe he could call her out and get her to take over somehow. The moment this plan cut through the jumbled circuits of his mind, a strange conversion process was executed, and:
“P-p-p-p-p-p-please let me marry your sister!!” The cry jetted from Haruyuki’s mouth.
Ash Roller’s eyes flashed red. No, they burned. “What. Did. You. Say?”
“Ah! N-no, um, it’s, what I’m trying to say—”
“Shuuuut iiiiit! Shaddaaaaaaaap!!” At the same time as Ash’s words rang out, sounding like a battle cry, he uncrossed his arms and clamped his hands down on the handlebars. He revved the V-twin engine and the fierce sound of the exhaust echoed in the parking garage.
“You! Made! The rage radiator of my mighty self overheat right into the red!!”
From the mouth area of the skull helmet, white steam jetted up with a sizzling sound. Or at least that’s what it felt like to Haruyuki.
Flames stretched out from the dual exhaust, and the front wheel pinning Haruyuki down reared up high. If he took another direct hit from it, his health gauge would drop into the danger zone. Not letting this chance slip by, Haruyuki shook both arms and legs, but the backside of his avatar had been embedded ten centimeters into the concrete floor, and he couldn’t pull free.
“Ah! Ah! Wait! Stop! Just a moment!!” The last bit in English. Although there was no reason his panicked cry would reach the older brother in the throes of rage at this stage, no matter the language.
The fat tire descending with a roar was on the verge of smashing Haruyuki’s helmet to pieces when it suddenly changed trajectories and crashed into the hood of the German luxury car parked immediately to the right. The rusting panel was crushed flat, and a brilliant pill
ar of flames rose up from inside. It quickly went out, but the flickering embers reflected in the chrome plating of the car reflected Ash’s body, as he snarled in a slightly subdued tone, “You know I’m all two-mountain here. I wanna do this with ya.”
After thinking a second, Haruyuki nodded to himself as he got it. Oh, two mountains—“yama-yama.” A direct translation into English of “very into it.”
“Damned crow. I s’rsly owe you now for back there in the Unlimited Neutral Field. So I’mma let you off here. But but! You come near my sis, and next time, I’ll make roast crow—naw, chop you up and make a stew outta you! Comprenez-vous?!”
“I—I—I—I—I understand! Yes, sir!” Reflexively reaching for politeness, Haruyuki pulled himself out of the him-shaped indent in the floor before finally taking a breath. He stared hard at the skull mask of Ash Roller, who was returning the bike wheel to the ground.
After a moment of indecision, Haruyuki felt like he had to ask, at the very least. Thus, still sitting on the floor, he took a deep breath and opened his mouth.
“So then…Um, Ash. Just…who are you, anyway?”
Haruyuki and Ash Roller lowered themselves side by side onto the hood of a desperate-looking, huge American-made sedan enshrined a little ways off. The timer in the top of his field of view was already down six hundred seconds—ten minutes. The fifteen minutes until the unlocking of the emergency lock he had set after flying out of the house in the real world was very nearly up. If he was going to put some distance between him and his Legion members, and settle things with the Armor of Catastrophe on his own, he needed to run out of the underground parking lot right then and there, and head off to the condo grounds.
But Haruyuki had no intention of leaving the duel field until the mysteries contained in this Burst Linker Ash Roller were revealed. He couldn’t say this wasn’t partly out of simple curiosity, but that wasn’t the whole story. After his “greatest rival,” the one he had dueled and won and lost against countless times in these eight months since he had stepped into the ring of the Accelerated World, was revealed on this other side in the real, he felt he had an obligation to try to understand the situation as best he could.