The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

  Wordlessly, Haruyuki spread the metal wings on his back and flew hard to his right. Instantly, the beams also bent sharply to follow. So it was a homing attack. Since the beams wouldn’t overlap until the last moment, a defense using a single sword stroke was impossible. Even if he took one of them out with his sword, the remaining five would shower down on him. Because his health gauge, cut down in the battle with the God Suzaku, had been fully recharged when he summoned the Armor, they couldn’t actually kill him with this one attack, but he would take a certain amount of damage.

  As he twisted and turned hard to his left, the black beams came after him, radiating a ravenous hunger. No matter how fast he maneuvered, not one of the homing beams faltered in its unerring pursuit. He might have been able to shake them if he flew straight ahead at full speed forever, but that was no different from running anyway.

  And he didn’t have the slightest intention of fleeing. Instead, Haruyuki spread his wings and put on the emergency brakes; hovering in midair, he turned to face them.

  The six beams pressed in on him, tangling up with one another in a complex way. Faint smiles bled onto the faces of the six Burst Linkers on the ground, perhaps taking Haruyuki’s stopping as a sign of surrender. As if acting in concert, Haruyuki also smiled coldly under his thick visor.

  Right hand gripping his sword, he crossed his arms in front of his chest. He arrogantly threw his head back and stared at the jet-black Incarnate bullets closing in on him. Stopped at an altitude of thirty meters, he drew the beams in and drew them still closer.

  When they were on the verge of showering down on his entire body in a direct hit, he muttered quietly:

  “Flash Blink.”

  Bwaan! Leaving behind only a momentary vibration, Silver Crow—or rather, the sixth Chrome Disaster, disappeared. Having lost their locked-on target, the dark beams raced around for a few seconds before erupting in black flames, some in the sky, some plunging through buildings on the ground.

  Haruyuki, meanwhile, was already scattering a blackish-silver light as he materialized essentially right beside the six ISS kit wearers standing on the ground.

  Flash Blink: The special attack of the ancient Burst Linker who gave birth to the Armor of Catastrophe in the Accelerated World—or more precisely, who twisted with his rage and despair the Destiny, the sixth star of the Seven Arcs, into the cursed Enhanced Armament the Disaster. The technique transformed his body into minuscule particles and pseudo-teleported them instantly to a distant location.

  Haruyuki didn’t even know that long-ago Burst Linker’s name. His strange dream inside the Castle was all he had, a piece of a fragmented memory of something that had happened in the distant past. There shouldn’t have been any way for Haruyuki to remember what he looked like or what techniques he had used. And yet he had understood—no, he had known. That the Haruyuki of that moment could use this power now.

  One of the kit wearers—a duel avatar with dull, dark brown armor and a left hand with gun barrels for fingers—did indeed stare with surprise at Haruyuki’s sudden appearance.

  “Da…” He moved to thrust out his right hand as he called the name of the technique. But that hand was still facing straight up, not aimed at Haruyuki, and he tried to rotate it further back, ignoring his actual range of possible movement. And then a dark silver line ran across the base of his shoulder. The arm was quickly removed from the torso and fell to the ground of the Demon City stage with a noisy clack.

  With lightning speed, Haruyuki had drawn the longsword in his right hand and severed his enemy’s arm in the same stroke.

  Similar to Flash Blink, this was not a technique he had originally been able to use. Unlike Takumu—Cyan Pile—Haruyuki had never studied kendo in the real world, and in all his time in the Accelerated World, he had focused on bare-handed fighting. He didn’t even know how to hold a sword-type Enhanced Armament, much less swing one. But he no longer cared what was happening to him. The intense urge to slice up the enemies before him and banish them from this world filled his head and heart.

  The dark brown avatar stared down at his own arm rolling along the ground for a minute before finally twisting his face mask up in the slightest bit of fear. “What are you…What is this power…”

  The voice leaked out from a mask fitted with round goggle-type lenses. The pain of the injury apparently caught up with him at last, and he pressed his left hand tightly over the opening at his right shoulder. Perhaps reflecting the wearer’s agitation and suffering, the light from the eye on his chest—the ISS kit—also flickered irregularly.

  But the kits of the five Burst Linkers standing to the rear all shone redly after a tiny hint of a delay. As if they were sending out energy, the kit in the brown avatar’s chest also regained its fierce light. Apparently, these six belonged to the same “cluster,” to use Takumu’s words. The fact that their ISS kits were linked meant that they were as genetically close as clones—in other words, parent and child, or siblings. That said, linking them was only a temporarily advantageous agreement; it wasn’t anything that could be called a “bond.” The fact that they had mercilessly hunted even Bush Utan, ostensibly a member of the same group, was proof of that.

  Bond…

  The instant the word popped up in his mind, something ached deep inside Haruyuki. A sensation like a single ray of hazy sunlight shining in the frozen darkness. Someone’s voice echoed from far, far, far away.

  …emember…you, too…ave them…cious bonds…!

  However, the overwhelming rage that immediately surged up in him again pushed the light and the voice away. “There’s no point in telling you my name,” Haruyuki muttered at the brown avatar before him, a pale burning blizzard of fury sinking into him. “Not when you’re going to disappear right here and now.”

  “…Don’t get…carried away…” The eyes in the lenses glowed red. The ISS kit pulsed in sync with the other five kits, like a heart. Apparently, this avatar was also no longer feeling any pain, although here in the Unlimited Neutral Field, it should have been double that of the Normal Duel Field.

  The brown avatar made a small signal with his left hand as he pulled it away from his wound. Instantly, the other five moved quickly to surround Haruyuki. The brown one was apparently their leader, but now, having lost an arm, the spearhead of the opposition would have switched to someone else. Deciding to crush that one with his next blow, Haruyuki started to turn around.

  But his feet abruptly, heavily stopped. When he looked down, he saw that at some point a gleaming green liquid had crept up to his feet, and two hands were reaching out from it to hold his ankles fast. It was almost, but not quite like the terrain effect Ensnare in the Cemetery stage. The liquid and the hands rising up from it were the melted arms of the duel avatar standing to the left. When the slender avatar met Haruyuki’s eyes, a sneer crossed the simple elliptical mask. Olive Grab.

  Haruyuki casually stabbed the hands grabbing his feet with the tip of the longsword dangling from his right hand. But the sharp metal met no resistance and simply sank in; it didn’t appear to do any damage. Apparently, in this state, Olive was impervious to physical attacks as he held his target with incredible force. The Armor likely hadn’t shown him this in the list of anticipated attacks because he had focused his gaze solely on the brown avatar.

  The remaining five avatars spread out equidistant around the captured Haruyuki and raised their left hands in a perfectly coordinated motion. A viscous inky aura blanketed tightly clenched fists.

  “Heh-heh, we’ll squeeze all your points out of you, too, every last one,” Brown said, in a creaking voice.

  Now, again, text cut across his field of view: PREDICTED ATTACK/INCARNATE ATTACK; RANGE/POWER ENHANCEMENT/NIHILISTIC ENERGY TYPE; THREAT LEVEL/30. The red predicted trajectory lines pierced Haruyuki directly from five different directions.

  The five avatars brandishing their fists above their heads dashed forward together, shouting as one voice, “Dark Blow!!”

  The straight punc
hes cloaked in darkness shot forward, burning the virtual atmosphere. However great the Armor’s defensive strength, if he was hit dead-on with five power-enhanced Incarnate attacks at the same time, he would take a fair bit of damage. But Haruyuki stared coolly at the approaching fists. Only their attack power was enhanced with Incarnate; the speed was not much greater than a beginner’s. Given Haruyuki’s rich history of special training to dodge the rifle bullets of red-type snipers, they were so slow, he was practically yawning. Once more, he drew the attacks well in, and then, when their auras were on the verge of making contact, he muttered the technique name beneath his visor.

  Flash Blink.

  Only a low vibration noise remained as the blackish-silver avatar disappeared from the spot. Olive Grab’s liquid fists clutched emptily at the air. Haruyuki teleported three meters or so to the rear and rematerialized, still in his standing position. Before him, the five fists, having lost their target and with no hope of pulling back now, crashed into one another.

  The sound of the collision was almost enough to rip the heavens open. Jet-black flames shot up and momentarily blanketed his field of view. He merely turned his face away slightly and allowed the flow of concentrated energy pushing at him to pass.

  When the blanket of flames had dissipated, five duel avatars came into view, rolling around on the ground and moaning. All had lost their left arms, right from the shoulder. The wounds looked as though the arms had been ripped off; the pain was, no doubt, far beyond that of having an arm cleanly sliced off with a sharp blade.

  “That…you…”

  Olive Grab sounded stunned, but without so much as glancing at him, Haruyuki took a few steps to place his right foot on the chest of a particular fallen avatar. Owner of reddish-brown armor, leader of the six. Now that he was missing both arms, however, he could no longer use Dark Shot or Dark Blow. Unable to even speak, the other avatar simply blinked the lenses of both eyes.

  “Don’t fall for the same trick twice,” Haruyuki said, in a low voice.

  Getting caught by the same technique—in this case, narrow evasion with Flash Blink—in another battle on a different day was one thing, but in the same battle, it was the height of stupidity. The rivals Haruyuki had previously fought ruthlessly would have grasped the nature and power of the technique just by seeing him dodge the first beam and would have responded immediately. Naturally, those rivals included Ash Roller.

  Ash must have hated it, being hunted by players like this, swaggering with easy power, forgetting the basics of the duel, relying on numbers. The instant this thought crossed Haruyuki’s mind, his chest began to throb and ache again, but even that feeling was soon replaced by a blind rage.

  Without considering how he must have looked to the eyes of Ash Roller in a ghost state awaiting regeneration very nearby, Haruyuki poured his strength into his right foot and the sharp talons readied there. Beneath his foot, he felt the ISS kit parasitizing the chest of the brown avatar pounding.

  “Ngah…! Hnngh…Hah!” A clear cry of anguish gushed out from the avatar’s mouth. Having lost both arms, he struggled and flailed as if trying to scratch at the earth, but the knifelike talons of the Armor dug deep into his chest to hold him fast. Finally, cracks radiated across the angular armor, and a florid light effect splashed out into the air.

  Spurred on by his fury, Haruyuki brutally cut down the health gauge of his enemy, while one part of his mind raced with digital thoughts, an independent processor.

  Was it possible to selectively destroy the ISS kits? If he could, he assumed something would probably happen when he did. He had noted earlier that the ISS kits were linked to one another through an invisible circuit. But rather than being a “peer-to-peer” type where kits with terminals were directly connected to each other, that connection was a central authority “client server” type. Perhaps it was possible that the instant a kit was destroyed, some sort of signal was sent to the main body of the kits that had to exist somewhere in the Accelerated World.

  Still feeling the pulsation of the ISS kit under his foot, Haruyuki pushed his foot down mercilessly.

  “Ngaaah! S-sto…Gah…Aaaaaah!!” The earsplitting scream rang out at the same time as the strange sound of the duel avatar’s torso cracking into pieces. The avatar split into upper and lower halves to the left and right of Haruyuki’s foot, and before he could let out one final scream, his health gauge dropped to zero in an instant, and a red light jetted from his body as he exploded into tiny fragments.

  Haruyuki coolly observed the death of the opponent he had so cruelly slaughtered. Silver Crow’s foot had indeed pushed through the ISS kit of the brown avatar. But judging from the death effect and the amount added to his special-attack gauge, he assumed that no Enhanced Armament destruction had taken place. Which meant that even if the ISS kit was pinpointed and attacked directly with a normal physical attack, only his opponent’s health gauge would decrease. The kit itself could not be destroyed like that.

  As robotic thoughts ran through Haruyuki’s mind, one of the enemies he had knocked aside finally stood up to his right. “Fall back! Forget Cocoa Cracker!” he shouted briefly.

  Cocoa Cracker was probably the name of the brown avatar Haruyuki had crushed and killed with his foot. Just like a hastily assembled gang to abandon their ostensible leader so easily. Olive Grab continued to stand motionless in front of Haruyuki, but the four avatars had no sooner nodded at one another than started to run south.

  So they were planning to escape through the leave point at Shibuya Station, farther along down Meiji Street. Judging from the direction of his gaze, the unmoving Olive was waiting to build up his gauge to use his abilities again.

  Haruyuki stood and stared at the four avatars racing off at top speed. He had not the slightest intention of letting them get away, however. He plunged the sword he clutched into the ground and raised his now-empty hands. He spread five sharp fingers wide and targeted the two on the ends of the fleeing foursome. He snapped his wrists back.

  Ksshk! A small silver light launched from the lower part of his palms. He dragged out glittering platinum tails in the air, the lights chasing like gunshots after the two avatars running hard a few dozen meters away. They caught up to them immediately, and hit perfectly on target in the middle of the Armor on their backs. A dry, metallic sound echoed through the stage, but the pair continued to run, not even staggering. They appeared to have taken essentially no damage.

  But…

  When Haruyuki pulled his arms back a bit, he felt a heavy resistance, and the two Burst Linkers in the distance lost their footing. They stumbled and tried intently to kick at the ground, but their bodies did not move forward. Finally, they angled backward, their feet peeling away from the road, and they let out high-pitched cries as they flew back in a straight line. More accurate, they were pulled back, whether they liked it or not, by the extremely fine wires launched from Haruyuki’s palms. The power of Wire Hook, an ability secreted away in the Armor of Catastrophe.

  In the blink of an eye, Haruyuki had yanked them back to where they started. He plunged the talons of his hands into their backs down to the knuckles to hold them fast and lift them up.

  “P-put me down!”

  “No way! He’s not using IS mode. How come he has this kind of power?!”

  Their voices as they struggled and fought, insects stabbed with pins, were nothing more than cacophonous noise to Haruyuki. Concentrating an image in both hands, he uttered, in a nearly inflectionless voice, “Laser Sword.”

  Zzvsssh! A heavy vibration shook the earth. Long, endless Incarnate swords stretched out from the hands of Silver Crow clad in the Armor of Catastrophe, piercing the prey he had captured. But the swords were not their original silver; they were dyed with an inky black overlay reminiscent of the abyss of space.

  Large holes ripped open their chests, much less the critical point of their hearts, and the two duel avatars rose up over a meter into the air from the aftereffects of the incredible attack power and sh
attered.

  Haruyuki lowered his hands, the two death effect colors reflecting off his dull silver armor. Through his visor, he could see the remaining two enemies pushing themselves to flee at even greater speed. Already, they were almost a hundred meters away. Naturally, he could have caught them easily if he used the wings on his back. But Haruyuki instead grabbed his longsword from the ground, dropped his hips, and yanked the blade back hard above his right shoulder.

  With the sharp tip of the sword, he set his sights precisely on the two avatars. Their silhouettes were already not even specks, but perhaps as an effect of the additional layer added to his field of view by the Armor, he experienced no loss of resolution. Coolly measuring his timing, the instant the bodies of the pair running started to overlap into one—

  “Laser Lance.”

  The sword in his right hand charged forward at the same time as he called the technique name. The dark aura encircling the blade transformed into a lance and shot off into space. The movement to launch the attack was basically the same as the Black King, Black Lotus’s Vorpal Strike Incarnate attack, which it was modeled after, but Haruyuki was unconscious of this as he watched for results with narrowed eyes.

  Off in the distance of Meiji Street, just as the two avatars were disappearing down the slope of Miyamasu-zaka, the Incarnate lance mercilessly skewered their backs. The avatars ran another few steps with massive craters in the middle of their bodies, as if they didn’t notice what had happened to them, before finally staggering and exploding, accompanied by the faint noise of destruction and a burst of extinction light.

  Shouldering the sword that he pulled back slowly, Haruyuki turned to his final enemy—Olive Grab, the avatar with the ability to turn to liquid.

  This was not the first time they had squared off. After school on Monday, three days earlier, when he had tag-teamed in the Suginami area with the “shrine maiden of the conflagration,” Ardor Maiden, she happened to select as their opponent the combo of Bush Utan and Olive Grab from the matching list. At that time, Haruyuki had been no match for Utan when he activated his ISS kit, but Maiden had gotten away from Olive without a scratch, even though he had to have been using the same dark Incarnate. Of course, she did have all the power one would expect from an Element of the former Nega Nebulus, but that probably wasn’t the whole story. There had to have been some kind of overwhelming difference in affinities.