The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

  Several times, he tried climbing up the walls of the hole. However, there weren’t even handholds on the black perpendicular surfaces, much less a ladder. On top of that, he couldn’t make a single scratch on them when he dug his nails in. And, of course, flying out was absolutely impossible.

  Because right now, Haruyuki was not his duel avatar Silver Crow. He was his plump and rotund real self. There were no tools in the pocket of his uniform, and there was no way that he could climb up a perpendicular wall with this body that could only do two pull-ups.

  So he held his knees with helpless arms, pushed his face down as hard as he could, and just kept listening to the low, heavy sound counting down to the end of everything, all while large tears spilled from between his tightly closed eyelids.

  I’ve always been like this.

  The time my indoor shoes were hidden for the first time, in second semester of third grade. The time when I was in fifth grade and was forced to imitate a pig in the classroom. Even after I started junior high, each time I had my pathetic allowance ripped off or I got punched for no reason at all, I ran away to some secret hiding spot, held my knees, and cried.

  So even if everything ends, I’ll just go back to those times. I’ll just wake up from a fun dream and go back to reality. Murmuring this in his heart, Haruyuki tried to shut out the sound pouring down from above.

  But the hands he brought up to plug his ears stopped halfway for some reason. He lifted his head the tiniest amount, cracked his eyelids open, and stared at the two appendages in front of him.

  Short, round fingers. Pasty palms from being kept hidden in pockets for so long. Hands that had so intently refused to reach out toward anyone, to clench for a fight…

  Do these two virtual meters feel that far to you?

  Abruptly, he felt like someone’s voice echoed faintly from far off. And then his own voice in reply:

  They do.

  “…But…” As he crouched at the bottom of the dark hole, Haruyuki spoke aloud his response to this exchange that reached him from some long-distant memory. “If I reach out, I get a little closer. If I take one step, I get even closer. Someone…very important taught me that.”

  He placed his hands on his thighs and staggered to his feet. He looked up above his head, but he couldn’t see any exit. Just perpendicular walls reaching up forever.

  Wiping away the tears spilling out of his eyes with the back of his hand, Haruyuki turned around and faced the black wall rising up before him—the infinite cliff he had tried to climb countless times before, until he inevitably gave up.

  But suddenly, he remembered: The memory was hazy, but he felt like he had done something like this before. He had been beaten down to the depths of despair, but he had climbed up a tall wall from there and found a new path.

  Unconsciously, Haruyuki clenched his right hand tightly. He stared alternately at the cool wall, shining black, and the softness of his real-world fist. Gritting his teeth, he steeled himself and raised his arm.

  It was an awkward punch, lacking speed and power, but even so, the instant his fist hit the wall, a burning pain shot through his right hand and into the core of his brain.

  “Unaaah!” Haruyuki cried out.

  Just barely staying on his feet, he cradled his throbbing hand to his chest. The skin was scraped away where the bones jutted up, and blood was oozing out. Naturally, there wasn’t even a single crack in the wall, much less any kind of indentation.

  Shoring up his faltering resolve, he clenched his left hand. “Unnh!” He pushed it forward with a pathetic yell.

  Bam! The sharp impact and then the fierce pain again. The tears he had calmed welled up again suddenly. He pressed his fist—blood oozing up on this one, too—to his mouth and frantically worked to hold back sobs.

  He wanted to sit down. He wanted to lean back against the wall, hold his knees, and plug his ears and cover his eyes until everything was over.

  However, somewhere in his brain, Haruyuki understood that if he did that, it wouldn’t just end with him returning to his original place in the world. The many friends he had gained in a new world would be sad, along with the childhood friends who had stood by him forever—and he would cruelly hurt her, the person more important to him than anyone; he would lose her, and block forever the road she should be walking down.

  “Unh…aah!” He hit the wall again with his injured right fist. A little blood flew onto the black wall, and a dizzying pain pierced the core of his brain.

  “Aaah…Aaaaaah!” Now the left. His flesh was crushed; his bones creaked. Tears and snot mixed together as they ran down his face, before falling in large drops on his chest.

  The wall was so hard, beyond stone or steel, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing a mere flesh-and-blood fist could do anything to. But Haruyuki kept shouting, half in pain and with a crumpled face, beating at the wall with his clenched fists. Right, left, right. From far above, the sound of a gong beating out destruction continued to rain down on him. He matched that pace and punched the wall. Punch.

  Soon enough, both hands were covered in blood and slowly swelling up. He had passed the stage of feeling pain as pain, and now a burning sensation that was hard to endure raced along his nerves, like they were being scorched directly with fire. If he slackened his focus for even a second, he might collapse and not be able to get back up again. So Haruyuki gritted his teeth so tightly they threatened to crack, and as high-pitched shrieks made their way through the gap, he punched the wall over and over.

  Again and again. Right, left, right, left, right again—

  “It’s no use.”

  A small voice came from behind him.

  Haruyuki dropped his battered fists for a moment and looked back over his shoulder.

  A much younger boy was standing at the bottom of the hole. His face was unfamiliar. He had on a T-shirt and knee-length shorts, and his longish hair hung over his forehead. From the fact that the boy was much shorter than Haruyuki, and his youthful face as well, it was probable that he was in second or third grade at best.

  The boy turned a nihilistic, somehow pitying gaze on Haruyuki. “It’s no use,” he said again. “You can’t break that wall.”

  Panting wildly, Haruyuki returned faintly, “That’s…You don’t know. Unless you try.”

  His hands were indeed on the verge of shattering, but they still moved; they could still clench. And he had his feet as well, he had his shoulders, he had his head, even. He had no intention of stopping until his body was completely destroyed and he could no longer stand up.

  He looked back at the boy, his eyes brimming with tears at the thought, and then started to turn back toward the wall.

  But before he could, the boy, shaking his head in tiny increments, said, “It’s impossible. I mean, this ‘despair,’ it’s not yours, it’s mine. This is the hole in my heart.”

  “What…”

  “You’re the first one who’s ever come down this far. But even from way, way shallower parts, there’s never been anyone who could get out of the hole. Not the person before you, or the person before that, or the person before that…This hole will disappear when the Accelerated World itself disappears. Until those guys who betrayed Fron and made her suffer have all disappeared, every last one of them, my despair won’t end.”

  The instant he heard this, Haruyuki understood.

  The young boy before his eyes was the first. The Burst Linker who had twisted the Arc Destiny, and the longsword Star Caster with the Incarnate of his overly massive rage and despair, and changed them into the Armor of Catastrophe, the Disaster, at the dawn of the Accelerated World.

  Chrome Falcon.

  “Have you…been here all this time?” Haruyuki asked hoarsely. But of course he had. Because the one who produced the pseudo-intelligence that lived in the Armor, that “Beast,” was this boy. It wasn’t strange at all that hidden in the depths of the core of the Beast was Falcon’s heart.

  However, if that were the case, then how ironi
c. Somewhere inside the data that made up the Armor of Catastrophe, the heart of the Saffron Blossom Falcon loved also survived. But Blossom, that golden-yellow girl, could not appear when the Enhanced Armament was activated as Disaster. And similarly, Falcon could not appear while Destiny was summoned. Sweethearts infinitely close and yet never to meet…

  No.

  No, that wasn’t it. Whatever form was summoned, Destiny and Disaster were one and the same. Haruyuki had seen it in the Brain Burst central server. If both of their hearts remained inside the zeta star of the Big Dipper that had glittered dazzlingly bright in the center of that trembling galaxy, then they had to have already met by chance.

  Forgetting the pain in his hands momentarily, Haruyuki thought hard about the fundamental difference between the Armor of Catastrophe, aka the Disaster, and the Arc, the Destiny.

  It was the fact that the Armor swallowed up the longsword Star Caster when in the Disaster state, while the two were separated when in the Destiny state. Only when the sword was separate, in other words, when it was calculated independently, could Saffron Blossom appear.

  It wasn’t the Armor Blossom lived in. It was the sword. The small companion star shining faintly beside the zeta Kaiyou. She herself might not have realized it, but Blossom’s thoughts existed inside that sword.

  The memory of the long, sad dream, brought back to life by the complete fusion with the Beast. At the final curtain of that tragedy, Saffron Blossom was devoured and killed endlessly by the Hell snake Jormungand, and then Jormungand dropped the item Star Caster. Almost like a present from the dead.

  “Is…that it?” Haruyuki murmured, in a voice that was not a voice.

  If his guess was right, then there existed only one way to break the curse called Catastrophe and sever the cycle of tragedy that had played out unbroken in the Accelerated World. Maybe. But to try it, he had to escape from this dark hole somehow. Before everything ended.

  “I…can’t give up,” Haruyuki said, staring hard at the young boy—at Chrome Falcon—standing there, head hanging. “I mean, I still exist here.”

  Turning around, he raised his battered right hand. None of his fingers worked to his satisfaction anymore, but he endured the pain and started with his little finger to bend them all into a fist.

  “Unh…Aaaaah…” Raising his voice, he brandished that fist with everything he had.

  “Aaaaah!!” And slammed it straight into the wall with a desperate cry.

  Crack! A hard sound rang out, and a crimson light raced around the core of his mind.

  “Ungah…Aaaaaah!!”

  Next, his left fist. The straight punch, with the angular momentum and weight of his body riding on it, charged forward, and fresh blood scattered on the wall.

  “It’s impossible…” A quiet murmur spilled out from behind him. “No one can break out of this despair. No one can sever the shackles of Catastrophe. Not until there’s only one left at the end of the world.”

  “…Do you…seriously…want that?” Haruyuki asked, brandishing his right fist. “Being the last one…means that you would bear all that sadness all by yourself. It means that you alone would carry the memories of the Burst Linkers who disappeared. Is that loneliness…really what you want?!”

  Crack!! He beat at the wall with all his might. Blood dripped from the hand he pulled back.

  “What I want? No, that’s not it,” the voice replied quietly, coolly, sounding even sad somehow. “They’re the ones who want to destroy everything with fighting. The ones who betrayed and killed Fron. I’m just trying to give them what they want.”

  “Then…then I’m asking you!” Haruyuki shouted, as he slammed his right fist into the wall, blood flying off and hitting his face. “What about what Saffron Blossom wants?! What about her wish to make it so that no one ever had to disappear from the Accelerated World?! Aren’t you betraying Blossom’s hope right now?!”

  For a while, he got no answer. Then finally, an even quieter voice shook the thick darkness.

  “Fron’s not here anymore.”

  One more time.

  “Fron’s gone. And a world without Fron doesn’t need hope. Those guys who killed her have no right to wish for hope.”

  “You’re wrong…You’re wrong!!” Haruyuki screamed, alternately swinging his bloody fists. “Even if Blossom’s gone, her hope lives on. It’s here right beside you!!”

  “…You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying!! If you reach out your hand…If you just reach out your hand a little to the other side of this wall…”

  “You’re lying!” Here, finally, the boy that was the residual thoughts of Chrome Falcon erupted in a shout. “The only thing that exists in this world is despair! No one can escape this pit of despair! Not you…and not even me!!”

  “Do you think…you’re the only one…who knows despair?!” Haruyuki howled, blood and tears flying. “If this wall is your despair…then I am going to smash it!! Me, Pigita, Barfuyuki, Pizzamaru, Piggy—Haruyuki Arita…!!”

  Convinced that his fist would shatter completely with the next blow, Haruyuki nevertheless pulled his right hand as far back as he could. Adding the force of a charge to it, the force of slamming it with his entire body—“I will smash it!!”

  Claaaang!! A crash roared through the dark pit, sounding like a fierce collision with Silver Crow’s metal armor.

  A moment of silence.

  Krk!

  A crack—extremely faint, but definitely there.

  And then Haruyuki saw it. A fine white line radiating outward bit by bit from the point of contact between the wall and his right fist.

  The world shuddered. The crack stretched out, picking up speed as it did, and reached the floor from the curving wall.

  “…You…,” a voice muttered from behind him.

  Haruyuki slowly turned and looked at the boy standing there, stock-still. Unconscious words flowed from his lips, which oozed blood because of the number of times he had bitten them.

  “I’m the same as you,” Haruyuki said. “…I’m sure, deep down, everyone in this world is like you…”

  Hearing this, the boy, Chrome Falcon, finally lifted his hanging head, albeit only the tiniest amount. Haruyuki couldn’t read his expression, but the instant his clear eyes caught Haruyuki’s…

  The world of darkness became countless shining shards of glass, and shattered.

  “Graaaaar!!” With an ominous roar, the right fist wrapped in dark metal armor was about to set out on its downward course yet again.

  Reflexively, Haruyuki slid that trajectory to the right, and below the fist, cracks radiated outward in the limestone paving stones, until the expanding shock wave made the entire tower shake slightly.

  Immediately to the left of that arm was the face mask of the Black King, Black Lotus, so thoroughly destroyed it seemed impossible for it to get any more so.

  The V-shaped side horns were both broken in half, and cruel cracks ran throughout the slickly shining mirrored goggles. The damage extended to her entire torso, to the point where it was hard to find an uninjured part of her.

  It was clear that the fists of the Disasterfied Silver Crow had inflicted this damage—Haruyuki’s own hands. As he opened both eyes wide in shock, his avatar’s left arm trembled and came back up on its own, ready to launch the next blow.

  Still straddling the Black King, Haruyuki mustered up his willpower and stopped his fist. Instantly, inside his head, a roar full of the Beast’s rage echoed wildly.

  WHY DO YOU FIGHT ME?! THIS IS THE ENEMY!! AN ENEMY TO BE DESTROYED!!

  Haruyuki’s entire body shook once more, but did not move any further. At the very least, the right to operate this duel avatar was currently his.

  No!! Haruyuki called back desperately in his mind, left fist still raised high. This person is not the enemy!! She’s…more important to me…than anyone…!!

  But he forced himself to cut the thought off there. He had no idea how long he would maintain priority with the avatar. B
efore he fell into a berserker state again, there was something he had to do.

  The ominous form of the longsword was plunged into the earth, crossing the right arm of battered and nearly unconscious Kuroyukihime. But this sword had not always had this form. In the long-distant past, Saffron Blossom had been devoured by the Hell snake Jormungand, and the silver sword appeared from inside that Enemy, like she was trying to communicate her dying wish. A dying wish that had been twisted by Chrome Falcon’s rage and grief and incorporated as one part of the Catastrophe.

  If, as Haruyuki had guessed, the soul of Blossom still remained inside this sword, and assuming that what produced the Catastrophe was Blossom and Falcon’s eternal separation, then he had to make them meet again. And he could think of only one way to make that happen.

  But an enormous obstacle still remained.

  It was obvious why the Beast ran wild and attacked Black Lotus. In the instant before the Black King attacked, Black Vise changed his own shape into a shadow portrait of Saffron Blossom and pried open the origin of the Beast, its greatest pain.

  According to Haruyuki’s memories up until the moment his mind was sent flying to the bottom of that darkness, after the Black King’s special attack pierced her chest, the fake Saffron had pretended to crumble and fall to the ground, dying, and then sunk into the shadows at their feet.

  And then immediately after that, every single terrain object, the walls and pillars that had stood on the roof of Mori Tower, had been completely blown away in the aftershock of the clash between Black Lotus and Chrome Disaster. Which meant that the shadows those objects made had also been eliminated. The power to move from shadow to shadow was no longer useful.

  In other words—Black Vise was still hiding in a shadow carved out in the ground before his eyes.

  Right now, he likely hadn’t realized that Haruyuki had escaped from his berserker state. But there was no doubt that if he sensed the slightest abnormality, he would come up out of the shadow and strike up his next demonic plan. If he wanted to pummel the layered avatar with a counterattack before that, Haruyuki wouldn’t be permitted a single misstep in the action he took now.