The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

  After Haruyuki nodded back, he opened his storage and turned the three items in question into objects. With the two card items in his left hand and the small key in his right, he slowly walked toward the house. He didn’t even have to put the key into the doorknob; at his approach alone, the cute door opened without a sound.

  “Pardon my intrusion,” he said, and slipped through the doorway.

  The inside of the house had been carefully customized with a variety of furnishings and small items, and even in the bluish-white light of the moon, it looked very cozy. But he did feel a thick sadness hanging in the long, still air. That was only natural. The two who had once lived in this house no longer existed anywhere in this world.

  Glancing back, he saw that Kuroyukihime and the others had apparently decided to wait in the entryway and were silently watching over him. In that case, he couldn’t make them wait too long. He had already made Utai in particular, who must have been tired after the long purification, keep him company for nearly two hours.

  Haruyuki turned his gaze back toward the inside of the house. “Blossom,” he said. “Thanks to the help you gave me, I was able to return to the people I love again…Falcon, I’m going to keep thinking about what it is you wanted, what you were trying to destroy…Thank you.”

  It was all he could do to put the many thoughts filling his heart into these brief words, what with his impoverished language abilities. Even so, he felt sure that he had managed to communicate what needed to be said to both of them, and he took a step forward. On top of the table where the two who had loved each other had eaten, talked, and gazed at the other, he placed the two card items. Next to these, he set the silver key.

  “Good-bye.”

  He took a step back and turned around, heading toward the door, where his friends were waiting. Just as he was about to leave the room, he felt like he heard someone calling out to stop him. Turning around again, Haruyuki saw…

  A slender, somewhat dark-silver avatar that looked a lot like Silver Crow standing to one side of the table. Beside him, sitting on the white chair, was a golden-yellow girl-type avatar. And on the girl’s lap, curled up in a circle, eyes closed happily, was a small black cat.

  The three figures were half-transparent in the moonlight and flickered hazily. But Haruyuki was sure that they were no simple illusion. The boy and the girl, and the kitten their love had produced, had finally returned to the place they were meant to.

  Good-bye. Someday, we’ll meet again.

  Holding back tears that threatened to spill over, Haruyuki once more murmured a farewell in his heart. And then he took a large step back, to return to where his friends were waiting for him outside the door.

  12

  Once again—the following day, Saturday, June 22, 2:30 PM.

  Haruyuki was walking by himself in the yard at Umesato Junior High. Since it was Saturday, his classes had, of course, ended in the morning. Apparently, for a while, starting at the end of the previous century, there had been a dreamlike era when the majority of elementary and junior high schools had had a five-day system—in other words, they had Saturday and Sunday off—but the number of schools reopening voluntarily for Saturday classes skyrocketed in the 2010s, and now, in 2047, the Ministry of Education acted as though there had never been a five-day system right from the start.

  But then, if Haruyuki had hypothetically had Saturday off, he couldn’t have simply spent the whole day lying around the house anyway, since the Brain Burst Territories were held at five PM every Saturday. This event to fight for control over areas in team battles of a minimum of three against three could be said to be the very reason for the existence of Legions.

  The Black Legion, Nega Nebulus, had managed to protect the entire Area within Suginami Ward with five people until then, but starting that day, they would be six. Naturally, this was because one of the former Elements, Ardor Maiden—Utai Shinomiya—had come back to the Legion. Not only did this mean they could split up into teams of three and simultaneously defend two territories, they also added to their ranks the long-awaited red long-distance type. Thus far, they had been mercilessly routed in battles that had someone with ridiculous defenses in the vanguard of the attacking team and someone else slamming them with massive firepower from behind that wall. But starting that day, that strategy would no longer work so well for his enemies. He would love to have Utai on the same team as him and, just once, be action-movie cool in their formation: “Mei, I’m gonna go smash that weapon in the back—cover me!”

  At some point, Haru realized he had stopped dead in the middle of the yard and was grinning to himself, and he hurriedly began walking again. His destination was, of course, the wooden animal hutch in the northwestern corner of the Umesato grounds, which the majority of students didn’t even know existed.

  Ever since the lone three members of Nega Nebulus had started fighting in the Territories the previous autumn, Saturday afternoons were, for Haruyuki, a time of boredom. They were released from the classroom at 12:50 PM, after the long homeroom in fourth period. Once he ate lunch in the deserted cafeteria after that, it was barely one thirty, and it felt like an eternity until the Territories started at five.

  Kuroyukihime was busy with student council work and Takumu and Chiyuri both had practice, so he couldn’t get any of them to hang out with him and kill time. Since they could take part in the battles from anywhere in the Suginami Area, there was no issue with him just going home, but then he couldn’t share the joy of victory (or the sadness of defeat) with the other three diving from the school, which was just too depressing. Thus, up to that point, he had done things like flip through the pages of picture books in the library or challenge himself to get new high scores in various games on the local net, but that lonely existence had also abruptly ended this week.

  Haruyuki had finally been assigned a job to devote his time to on Saturdays: president of the Umesato Junior High Animal Care Club.

  Arriving in front of the animal hutch, he peered in through the wire screen to begin his agenda with a greeting. It might have been a hutch, but it was relatively large inside, where two tree perches stood. On the highest branch of the one on the left sat the figure of a bird. He held on with one foot, eyes closed sleepily. It was a bird of prey about twenty centimeters in length, a gray pattern on its white plumage, sharp beak buried in the down of his chest—a northern white-faced owl, Hoo.

  Since it had still only been five days since they’d met, Haruyuki didn’t really feel that the owl was ready to open up to him, but even so, perhaps sensing his presence, Hoo raised just his right eyelid and stared at Haru with a beautiful, copper-colored eye.

  “Hey, Hoo. Pretty hot today, huh?” As he spoke to the bird, he manipulated his virtual desktop and connected with the body weight and temperature sensors embedded in Hoo’s perch. Both were within the normal range, and his weight, which dropped a little immediately after he moved here, seemed to have basically returned to normal.

  At Haruyuki’s greeting, the white-faced owl flapped a wing in restless annoyance before once more going into nap mode. Haruyuki smiled wryly and went to wirelessly open the door’s electronic lock so he could first wash and replace the paper laid out in the hutch.

  From behind, he heard the quiet sound of footsteps on the mossy ground. He turned, thinking that Hoo’s original owner, Matsunogi Academy fourth-grade student Utai Shinomiya, was already here. But there, Haruyuki saw someone not only completely unexpected but completely unfamiliar.

  The white, short-sleeved shirt and gray skirt with the hint of green in it was the uniform of Umesato. The ribbon around her neck was blue—eighth grade. The loosely curled long hair, the thinly plucked eyebrows, and the eyeliner just barely light enough so it wouldn’t be called out by the teachers all indicated that she belonged to a school caste that Haruyuki had basically zero connection with. The Neurolinker peeking out of her collar was also the “deco” type, a glossy pink studded with rhinestones.

  Approximately 0.
2 seconds after looking at the beautiful but somehow coercive face, Haruyuki dropped his gaze toward the ground. “Uh, um, did you…lose something?” he mumbled. “If I find it, I’ll make sure to note it in the lost and found in the local net, so…” He said this, assuming that there would be no other reason for a student like this to ever come out to this part of the school grounds. But a few seconds later, he got another surprise.

  “What, you forgot? You’re supposed to be the president, y’know.”

  “Huh?” Reflexively, he jerked his head up and looked at the girl’s face again, for 0.5 seconds this time. And then he did actually feel like he had met her somewhere before. They were in the same grade at the same school, so he had probably passed her or something in the hallway, but it wasn’t that— Wait. President? Did she mean of the Animal Care Club?

  “Oh! R-right, you’re, uh…Class B…I-Iza—” He dug intently into the deepest layers of his memory for the name.

  “Iiiiizeeeekiiii!” a scary voice corrected him. “Reina Izeki!”

  No longer able to look at the girl’s face, Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down. He had completely forgotten she existed, but this Izeki was essentially Haruyuki’s colleague—a member of the same club. She was one of the three people newly elected at the beginning of this week, to accommodate the animal (Hoo) from Matsunogi Academy, which was part of the same corporation as Umesato. Haruyuki had announced his candidacy and ended up president, so forgetting the name and face of a member was absolutely unforgivable.

  He panicked slightly at the dangerous mistake, at the super blunder, but fortunately, rather than reproaching the president any further, Izeki simply moved briskly over to the hutch. She peered in through the mesh. “Oh, wow!” she said, the swords gone from her voice. “It’s, like, really an owl. Damn! It’s, like, super fluffy, right?”

  Her tone, at any rate, expressed simple surprise, and she was even taking care to lower her voice out of consideration for the clearly sleeping Hoo, so Haruyuki was slowly released from his state of fear.

  “Y-yeah. An owl. It’s a northern white-faced owl,” he noted timidly.

  Izeki glanced back at him, her curls swinging. “Is a white-faced owl different from a regular owl?”

  “Oh! Um. A white-faced owl’s a type of owl. More precisely, Strigiformes order, Strigidae family, Otus genus.”

  “Whoa. What’s its name?”

  “Hoo.”

  “…That is some seriously simple naming there. Who named it?”

  “A-apparently, they voted on it.” Although it was just him somehow answering questions when asked, he was at any rate managing to carry on a conversation.

  Izeki nodded with a “huh” and turned her eyes back toward the hutch. She put a hand to her mouth and called out quietly, “Hoo, Hooooo.”

  There’s no way that extremely unsociable Professor White-face there is going to respond to someone he’s only just met in the middle of the day like this, Haruyuki thought. But the instant Hoo heard Izeki’s voice, he snapped open not one, but both eyes. He turned his head around and seemed to identify the person standing beyond the mesh, but what surprised Haruyuki was that he spread both wings and flew off his perch.

  “Whoa! Wow!” Izeki cried out at the sight of Hoo flying majestically inside the hutch. “It’s flying! It’s flying! Crap! It’s super gorgeous!”

  …I show up and I get one eye open. What’s with the big show here? Haruyuki unconsciously grumbled in his heart, but Hoo flew around a full five times in feigned ignorance before returning to the perch and sleep mode, holding on with one foot, ear coverts tucked back. Izeki watched with even greater enthusiasm.

  Turning toward her face in profile, Haruyuki hesitantly asked, “So, um, Izeki…why all of a sudden today?”

  Instantly, she was glaring at him out of the corner of her eye, and he froze up once more. “Well, I am a member of this club, too. Not a crime for me to show up?”

  “Th-that’s true…but on the first day, you didn’t—you didn’t seem so happy to be in the club…I kinda thought, but—”

  “That’s ’cos I was seriously crazy tired then, and you said it was okay, so I just went home! But then I saw the activity log actually being uploaded, and I dunno, I kinda regretted going home, like, I figured making you clean that shed all by yourself, totes impossible! That a crime?!”

  Unable to tell whether he was being blamed for something or apologized to, Haruyuki shook his head from side to side. “N-no, that’s not a crime.”

  “That’s why I thought I should hurry and say sorry, but then you didn’t give us any jobs at all! You just do the club stuff by yourself every day, so I had to come to you, you know! That a crime?!”

  “N-no, that’s not a crime at all.” Shaking his head from side to side once more, Haruyuki worked hard to process and synthesize the convoluted story, and reached a conclusion. Looking up at Izeki, he nervously sought confirmation. “Umm. S-so then, uh, Izeki, you came to do the club work, to take care of Hoo?”

  “That’s what I been saying this whole time!”

  Really? He stopped himself from cocking his head to one side and let out the breath he’d been holding in a long sigh.

  If that was the case, then even if it was someone from a class he had absolutely no connection with in everyday life, and a girl on top of that, he was honestly glad to have her. The hutch was big, and cleaning it was pretty hard. Plus, when he was by himself, he had to be really careful about opening and closing the door. He sucked the June air, with its scent of green, into his empty lungs. “Okay, then,” he said boldly. “Umm, a whole bunch of leaves have piled up in front of the hutch again. How about we clear them away first? We can just sorta push them together with a broom.”

  “Okay!”

  Fortunately, this time, rather than grumbling about how tired she was or how annoying this was, Izeki accepted the bamboo broom Haruyuki held out to her. He felt secretly relieved at the sight of her awkwardly sweeping away the damp leaves, and then he also started working.

  Hoo appeared to no longer be paying attention to the pair of humans working in front of the wire mesh; he simply continued to doze on the perch. The white-faced owl was totally at home in his new residence five days after moving in, and Haruyuki spoke to him in his mind as he worked.

  Hoo, I have to thank you. This is the first time I’ve ever taken care of a living creature, but I actually feel like you’re teaching me all kinds of things instead. The meaning of living, of flying. I can’t put it into words properly, but I think it’s because I got to meet you that I could fly faster and higher than the God Suzaku.

  I’m still totally hopeless in the real world and in the Accelerated World…and even still, it’s only bit by bit, but lately, I’ve started feeling like I’m moving forward…

  Digesting these thoughts, he actually moved to take a step forward.

  Instantly.

  Something was yanking on the back of his shirt.

  “Ngh?!” Startled, Haruyuki looked back, and found yet another wholly unexpected personage.

  She was also in a school uniform, but the ivory summer cardigan and the plaid skirt were not that of Umesato Junior High. Short, fluffy, unruly hair, bright-green Neurolinker. The fingertips of her right hand were holding tightly to Haruyuki’s shirt, and for some reason, both eyes were damp. Her appearance here was unexpected, but she was not unknown to him.

  “R-R-R-Rin Kusakabe,” he said, right cheek stiffening. “Wh-wh-what are you…?”

  And then, for some reason, suddenly tears. Blithely dodging both the vocalized and unvocalized questions, the Great Wall member, level-five Burst Linker Ash Roller—and the girl Rin Kusakabe in the real world—opened her mouth slightly. “Who…are you?”

  Naturally, the question to establish identity was not directed at Haruyuki. Rin’s gaze was turned toward Izeki, the Animal Care Club member standing a little ways off, bamboo broom still in hand, gaping. When Haruyuki froze, unable to comprehend the current situation, she str
ode over somewhat haughtily.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” she remarked, in a voice that was just the slightest bit thorny. “That uniform’s Shibuya Sasajo, yeah? What’s a little princess doing in a place like this?…Wait. Huh? What? Is that it?”

  Haruyuki had basically no idea what it was, but he did feel something improper somehow in the eyes Izeki was shooting back and forth between him and Rin.

  To at least put the situation on hold, he waved his hand. “I-I-I-Izeki, h-h-h-hold on a minute!”

  And then he moved over to the wall of the second school building, dragging Rin still clutching his shirt. “Uh, um, uh, Kusakabe—” he said, with a quiet urgency.

  “My brother’s Kusakabe, too, so you can just call me Rin.”

  “R-R-R-R-R-Rin, um, okay…What are you doing here?! We have the Territories later—Oh! A-a-a-are you maybe going to go in from here? I mean, are you—?”

  You’re not actually going to transfer Legions today? Leave Great Wall for Nega Nebulus? So then starting today that mighty-me-mega-lucky century-end rider’s my comrade?

  Rin moved her head at a slight angle. “I’ll be. Fighting,” she said. “But…I’m on the. Attacking side again. Today. Transferring Legions. That’s for. My brother to decide.”

  “Oh! Th-that’s…” He nodded, tasting something like relief, something like regret, and then was stunned once more. “A-a-a-attacking side?! B-b-b-but the Territories are a minimum of three people. Where are the other two?”

  “They’re on standby. On the border between Shibuya. And Suginami. It’s U and…”

  U was the familiar Ya feel me?! Bush Utan. Although he had been swallowed up by the magical power of the ISS kit, after he was betrayed and hunted by his friends, he had apparently been able to return to his old self. Even if the kit hypothetically remained within the avatar, it was possible to have him purified by Ardor Maiden after the Territories were over that day or something.