“We’re not doing anything you’d feel particularly guilty about if Chiyuri or Takumu happened to see, are we? Or is it all right for you to have spontaneous sleepovers with them, but I don’t have the right to sit alongside you on a bench?”
“N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no. Th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-that’s not it at all.”
If he allowed any additional information to leak out of his brain in this exchange, things would get extremely not good. So Haruyuki cut off his evasive thoughts and finally turned his eyes toward the girl sitting next to him—the Legion Master of Nega Nebulus, Haruyuki’s parent, the Black King, Black Lotus aka Kuroyukihime.
To begin with, he timidly gave voice to the biggest question. “Um. I thought you were going to get a ride home from Raker? So then why are you…?”
“Mmm. Well, a simple reason. Fuko’s child—Rin Kusakabe, was it? She said her house is in the exact opposite direction as mine, in Egota in Nakano Ward. Uiui lives quite near Fuko, so that’s fine, but for her to take me home as well was simply too inefficient. I declined the offer and said I would take a taxi. Incidentally, I didn’t go so far as to say what time I would get that taxi, so I haven’t lied to Fuko and the others.”
“O-oh, right. Wait. Where is your house again?” Haruyuki asked nonchalantly.
Kuroyukihime’s eyebrows twitched, followed by a mischievous smile spreading across her face. “Now see here, you. Didn’t you look at my student diary?”
He felt like he had heard this line somewhere before, and after a moment of confusion, he hurriedly shook his head from side to side. “I—I—I didn’t look inside! And anyway, that was a long time ago!”
“Ha-ha-ha! Eight months ago, hmm? I remember it well.” Kuroyukihime laughed for a while, shoulders shaking, and then finally got a look on her face as though she had just remembered something.
“By the way, Haruyuki.” Her voice was quiet, and the hand she laid on Haruyuki’s squeezed tightly. “I assume you’re going out by yourself at this time of night to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field in a deserted area outside the twenty-three wards. My hypothesis is perfectly correct, yes?”
She cut to the heart of the matter so suddenly that Haruyuki unconsciously bobbed his head up and down.
“Oh! B-but it wasn’t to go and lose all my points by myself or anything,” he added hurriedly, but Kuroyukihime nodded, as if to say she had even seen through to that point as well, and swiftly piled on another question.
“So then you left some kind of excuse for your mother for going out in the middle of the night?”
“Y-yeah. I said we had group homework and I was staying at Taku’s.”
He thought for an instant she might reproach him for the crime of perjury, but to his surprise, Kuroyukihime nodded coolly again.
“Mmm. Good. Then we should go.” The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she was standing up, still holding Haruyuki’s hand.
Dragged along, he half stood, and she started walking jauntily. Toward the condo entrance—no, the main gate to the southeast.
“Huh? Um, what exactly…?” This was the path he had originally been on, but Haruyuki couldn’t quite grasp Kuroyukihime’s intentions and flapped his mouth in confusion.
But the black-clad vanguard said nothing in response as she cut through the front garden dotted with couples. Without even pausing, she stepped through the gate, off the condo grounds, and onto the sidewalk of the ring road known as Kannana Street.
Apparently, she had at some point made a request from her virtual desktop, and with impeccable timing, a single EV stopped in the lane before them, turn signal winking. It was a taxi, blue lines on the white vehicle, an old-style lamp on the roof. The rear door opened automatically, and without a word, Kuroyukihime pushed Haruyuki in before slipping in after him herself. She offered a simple “thank you” to the middle-aged male driver, who responded with an “of course” as he pulled out smoothly into traffic.
In this day and age, it was normal to send the destination alongside the taxi request, which was sent via Neurolinker to cars driving in the area, so Haruyuki had no idea where they were heading. Half-dumbfounded, half-excited, he peeked out through the windshield and watched as the taxi, which had started out north on Kannana, soon turned left onto Waseda and headed straight west.
So then she’s planning to go to Musashino with me? But that’s no good. In the fleeting moment Haruyuki had this thought, the car turned left again, not having gone even a kilometer. They went down the residential street, slipped past the elevated Chuo Line, and went further south. In a few minutes, they came out onto Oume Kaido, and this time turned right, and then another left soon after that.
Roughly speaking, from Haruyuki’s condo, they had sort of approached the direction of Umesato Junior High and then moved away from it again…or at least, that’s what he thought. But their destination remained a mystery. The scene outside the window turned into a residential area again, and the greenery gradually increased. A minute or two later, the taxi stopped, hazard lights flashing.
Payment was also taken care of by Kuroyukihime with her Neurolinker, so it was invisible to Haruyuki. The driver called out a hearty “Thank you!” at the same time as the door opened. Kuroyukihime thanked him back as she got out, and Haruyuki could do nothing but follow her.
On the other side of the quietly departing EV was a sight that seemed impossible in the whole country of Japan, much less in the middle of Suginami Ward.
Stylish white-walled town houses stood neatly and evenly spaced on excessively large plots, and the street was lined with plentiful lawns and trees. It was almost like the set of an American-made family drama, but the houses had a shared design and were by no standard large.
“Uh, um, where…exactly…?”
“Mmm. Right. You’ve only just started eighth grade. This comes up in Social Studies in the second term, I believe. This is a URB called Asagaya Jutaku, a condo-type housing complex with a nearly hundred-year history. It was redeveloped at the beginning of this century, but this division alone was basically left as it was.”
“Uh, uh-huh.” Now that she mentioned it, he did indeed get the sense of architectural cohesion in the look of the residential area, highlighted in the orange of the streetlamps. “So then, it’s like a cultural heritage site?”
“Mmm,” Kuroyukihime replied to the vague question. “Well, I suppose you could say that.” She took Haruyuki’s hand once more before starting to walk down the curving street.
Kuroyukihime, what are you trying to tell me by showing me this place? Something the me now needs—no, something important that I have to come to on my own?!
Digesting the place in his mind, Haruyuki walked alongside Kuroyukihime. The humid June air was merely depressing in the inorganic metropolitan areas, but in this place, it seemed almost refreshing, rich with the exhalation of the plants. They advanced a mere two meters or so along the two-lane road, black and wet, perhaps from a short rainfall not too long ago, and then Kuroyukihime stepped into a lane that broke off to the right.
The pavement—which made luxurious use of natural stone tiles—was just barely wide enough for them to walk side by side, and he wondered if it wasn’t a public road, but rather a private path attached to a building. But Kuroyukihime did not waver in her stride. However, if they were invading private property, the residents might call the police on them. If Kuroyukihime risked even that to try to tell him something, then…
Haruyuki racked his brain so hard that smoke threatened to come out of his ears, as Kuroyukihime came to a stop in front of one of the town houses. She then raised her right hand without the slightest hesitation and pushed open the black cast-iron gate.
“Huh? What?”
They couldn’t just go opening the gates to someone else’s house. He didn’t even have the time to finish the thought before he was given an even bigger shock, and his eyes and mouth opened as far as they would go.
Not so much as blinking, Kuroyukihime passed thro
ugh the open gate and reached out toward the doorknob of the house standing neatly beyond it.
“Uh! Um! That’s!” Still standing in front of the gate, Haruyuki was startled into speaking. “Wh-what are you doing, Kuroyukihime?! Y-y-you’re gonna get yelled at!”
“Mm? Why? And who would yell?”
“Who? Obviously, the person who lives—”
“No need to worry about that.” Kuroyukihime shrugged lightly. “This is my house.”
“…Huh?” His jaw, already on the floor, dropped right through it as Haruyuki reeled.
“When you come in, close the gate,” a cool voice instructed. “It locks automatically.”
“…Okay.” Any other reaction was beyond him.
A bungalow with a loft, one bedroom, a living room, a dining room, and private garden. This was the dwelling of the beautiful girl in black and her many mysteries.
After Haruyuki took off his shoes and stepped into the house in a trance, Kuroyukihime led him to a spacious living/dining area of about twenty square meters.
“I’m going to go change. Make yourself comfortable.” Leaving with these words, she disappeared through a door in a wall on the west side.
Haruyuki staggered into movement once more and came to a stop in the middle of the living room, before attempting to at least gather some visual information despite the fact that his brain was at a standstill.
Given that it was a one-story house, the design was compact, but the floors and pillars were lavishly made from natural wood, and the south-facing windows were large, so there was a sense of openness. Unexpectedly, the room wasn’t decked in black. The wallpaper and the ceiling were a light gray, the area rug and curtains covered in brown stripes. Furniture was on the sparse side, with a small table and a beanbag chair, plus a ladder-type rack placed up against the western wall. In the adjacent kitchen on the other side of a counter, he could basically only see a small fridge, a multipurpose microwave, and a slim cabinet. He didn’t get the impression that any cooking took place in there.
The thing that drew the eye in this extremely restrained interior design was a large tank in the southeastern corner. Haruyuki moved as if drawn in by it, and peered into the aquarium lit by orange LEDs.
There were maybe twenty small tropical fish. He felt like that was too few for the size of the nearly meter-long tank; what occupied the water world instead were a great number of water plants. There were all kinds—one like a shaggy carpet, one with thin, elliptical leaves trailing, one that looked like a micro bamboo grove—but the plant that stood out had several thin, long stalks soaring from the center of the base up to the water’s surface.
Since the top of the tank was closed with a lid that had devices to maintain water quality and temperature, Haruyuki crouched down and peeked up at the water surface from below, feeling like a fish gazing up at the outside world from inside the water. The dozens of distinctive round leaves floated on the water at the ends of stalks, some even seemingly stretching their heads up into the air.
He had seen the shape of these dark green leaves somewhere before. But, I mean, I’ve never been interested in water plants or anything. He cocked his head to one side and then suddenly remembered.
In the fourteen or so years of his life, there had been just one time. He had spent several days gathering information online, and then struggled for over an hour once he was actually at the shop, where he bought a marine plant that cost all the allowance he had saved up. The plant with the long stalks and round leaves he had chosen, put into a vase, and taken to a certain hospital was a tropical water lily.
“The water lily you gave me, I looked it up. It’s a Lindsey Woods,” a voice suddenly murmured in his ear.
Haruyuki jumped and whirled around.
Kuroyukihime had changed from her Umesato uniform into a sleeveless housedress that hung straight down, and was bending down to peer into the tank. It might have been housewear, but the dress was all black, so it had the air of a party dress somehow. Here, finally, Haruyuki’s brain was jerked out of its idling, almost-stalled state and regained about 80 percent of its output, forced into an acceptance of the situation.
At this time of night, when it’s coming up on ten o’clock, I am at Kuroyukihime’s house for the first time, and it’s just the two of us, and on top of that, I left a message at home saying I wouldn’t be back today. So, like, what?! What is even happening?!
The thought flashed through his mind, but since he felt it was extremely dangerous to consider what might lie ahead, Haruyuki earnestly jumped on the information before him.
“I-it is? I—I—I—I picked it just for the color,” he replied, turning back around and peering into the tank once more.
Kuroyukihime laughed. “I didn’t know the name of even one ornamental lily at the time, either. I only learned about them after you gave me those flowers.”
After she sustained serious injuries last fall, Haruyuki had brought a bouquet of tropical water lilies when he went to visit her on the day she was moved from the ICU to a general ward room. Of course, the selection had been connected with Kuroyukihime’s duel avatar, Black Lotus, but four or five leaves other than the lily flowers had been added to the bouquet the shop clerk make for him. Because he remembered the round shape of the slender stalks, even without seeing the flower, he could guess that those were water lilies growing in the tank before him.
“S-so then, are these lilies the same as those flowers?”
Kuroyukihime shook her head, a playful—or perhaps innocent—smile slipped across her face, almost like a young child boasting. “They are indeed the same genus, but that’s not all. The plants I’m cultivating here are the very flowers you gave me eight months ago. Well, more accurately, the ‘children’ of those flowers.”
“What?!” Haruyuki was stunned, and he stared hard at Kuroyukihime’s profile, illuminated by the tank lights. “B-but the ones I bought were cut flowers! I thought they wouldn’t grow roots even if you put them in soil.”
“Mmm. That’s exactly right. But I learned after doing some research that some lilies, including the Lindsey Woods you gave me, are called ‘propagule species.’ They grow new leaves and roots from a propagule you can cultivate from the base of a leaf; in other words, a bud.”
“Huh? F-from the leaves?”
“Exactly. After I learned this, I took a good look at the five leaves that were in that bouquet, and there was just one that had developed a bud. I got it to sprout in a pot of water, and then after I got out of the hospital, I moved it to this tank. It was actually quite some work to get them to grow to this size these last eight months. Unfortunately, it will apparently take another month or so to get them to bloom.”
Surprise at the vitality of plants and a deep emotion at the trouble Kuroyukihime had gone to, her connection to the life of the flower he had bought, filled his heart, and Haruyuki focused his gaze on the stalks swaying in the water. Like this, they passed a few seconds, or perhaps a few minutes, in a strangely peaceful silence.
Eventually, however, Kuroyukihime leaned forward and gently touched Haruyuki’s back. “Come and see them again when the flowers bloom,” she said. “Now, shall we sit already?”
The beanbag chair on the rug laid out by the living room window was fairly large, and Kuroyukihime sank down into one side of it. When Haruyuki remained frozen in place, she pulled on his arm and mercilessly made him sit next to her.
The fine powder beads changed shape to smoothly hold his weight. Inevitably, his body turned toward the center of the cushion, and he slid down the tiniest bit toward Kuroyukihime, to his right. Their arms touched, and Haruyuki’s consciousness once again threatened to fly off beyond the stratosphere. But Kuroyukihime lifted her right hand in a relaxed gesture and quickly flicked at her virtual desktop.
The lighting in the living room dimmed until it was just barely on, and the curtains automatically opened about a meter, while the transparency of the variable privacy glass increased. On the other side of t
he window, the broad-leaved trees and the lawn of the garden rose up in the restrained illumination of the street lamps, and then off in the far distance, the lights of the redeveloped high-rise housing complex glittered, almost cutting into the night sky.
It was like he was peeking into metropolitan Tokyo of the current 2047 from some long-past century. Haruyuki realized all over again that Kuroyukihime probably—no, definitely lived all by herself in this small town house in one corner of Asagaya Jutaku. “How long have you lived here?” he asked slowly, unconsciously.
Her reply came after a delay of five seconds or so. “I moved out of the house I originally lived in and started living here right before I started at Umesato. To put it more accurately…that would have been six months after I took the head of the first Red King with this hand.”
Haruyuki swallowed his breath and thought about the meaning of her words. Actually, it was obvious without thinking about it: Kuroyukihime was telling him that she had not left home for the reason of attending junior high school in the real world, but rather because of the murder of the Red King, an incident in the Accelerated World.
But what exactly was that supposed to mean? Haruyuki understood that she had forced Red Rider into total point loss through the level-nine sudden-death rule because she was resisting the mutual nonaggression treaty the Seven Kings were attempting to conclude among themselves at the time. In other words, both cause and effect started and finished in the Accelerated World alone, so how did that connect with why she had to leave home?
“I’ve actually…never told anyone that before. Not even Fuko and Utai and the others…” Abruptly, Kuroyukihime leaned her head on Haruyuki’s shoulder. “Red Rider wasn’t the only king I hunted. I also tried to subjugate another king with these hands. And not through an ordinary duel. A physical threat in the real world. In other words, through a real attack, with violence.”