The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

  The small flame shimmering a dull gray on the sand a little ways off was no doubt Iron Pound’s death marker. It had fallen along with them in the building’s destruction. Right now, Pound was no doubt anxiously observing Haruyuki and Green Grandé facing off in his ghost state, where all he could do was watch over the situation around him.

  Through the direct clash of his Incarnate alongside the Green King’s, and the glimpse of his opponent’s memories, Haruyuki felt like he could understand to a certain degree what Iron Pound had said before the fight, about how much time their king had sacrificed to the Accelerated World. He turned his gaze back on the king.

  “The majority of the points supplied through Enemy hunting in the Accelerated World…You actually earned them by yourself, huh?”

  No answer. But the silence was colored with an air of affirmation.

  For the thousand or more Burst Linkers who existed, burst points were in-game currency, experience points, and life itself. Their number increased if you won duels and decreased if you lost, but a large quantity were also exhausted in using the acceleration commands, buying items in the shop, and processing level increases. Considered rationally, the supply of points didn’t seem to match up against that pace of consumption. The fact was that each month, Burst Linkers used up an amount of points largely in excess of the monthly increase brought to the world by new Burst Linkers’ initial hundred points.

  The shortfall was supposedly made up for by high-level Linkers hunting Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field, but still, Haruyuki had always thought it strange that those points were so widely redistributed in the Accelerated World.

  The Green King had hunted the high-ranking Enemies that lived in dangerous dungeons, transferred the vast sum of points he’d earned onto various blank cards from the item shop, and then fed those cards to the lower-ranking Enemies living in the field, which would then drop as loot. At some later point, other Legion hunting parties would then defeat those Enemies that had eaten the cards, in turn receiving an enormous amount of points as a bonus to the initial kill. As a result, his farmed points spread out among the low-level Linkers of the midsize and small Legions.

  Not unlike a great tree supporting countless smaller lives with the sunlight and water stored in its massive body.

  But no matter how he thought about it, Haruyuki didn’t understand the reason the Green King had provided this service for free for so many years. The hunters of the Enemies who had eaten the point cards wouldn’t necessarily be members of the Green Legion. In fact, the opposite case would naturally have been the overwhelming majority. In other words, the king’s actions substantially benefitted other kingdoms. Looking back on it, Haruyuki himself remembered being overjoyed when the prey he had brought down with an Enemy hunting party he had been a part of spit out an essentially impossible number of points.

  “Why?” Haruyuki asked in a whisper, unable to understand the foundation for the king’s actions. He had shared points with all, even enemy Burst Linkers. But on the other hand, the lives of his Legion subordinates Ash Roller and Bush Utan had not been priorities.

  There likely would be no response to this question, which could not be answered with a yes or a no. That was what he expected.

  “It was all to stop Brain Burst 2039—also known as Trial Number Two—from ending in vain.” The silent king uttered his longest string of words so far, but the blow to Haruyuki’s soul came more from the details contained in those words, even if he didn’t really understand what they meant.

  “Trial…Number…Two?”

  “Aye. A long time has already passed since Accel Assault 2038 and the following Cosmos Corrupt 2040 were abandoned. It’s likely that this Number Two is equipped with whatever elements were missing from Number One and Number Three. Until those elements are embodied, we can’t let this world be closed.”

  The information the Green King put into words in his stubbornly tranquil voice far surpassed Haruyuki’s processing abilities. Even so, he managed to summarize it into three key points and list them in his heart.

  One: Brain Burst—in other words, the Accelerated World—was not the one and only.

  Two: The Green King, Green Grandé, was working to maintain or prolong the life of the Accelerated World.

  Three: Green Grandé knew the reason this world existed.

  “You the GM?” Haruyuki questioned the giant in a tense, creaking voice. “Are you— Is it actually you who’s the admin for Brain Burst? Is it you manipulating thousands of Burst Linkers, making them dance? Making them fight?” He waited for a response with bated breath, not considering what he would do if the Green King assented.

  Two seconds later, the king shook his thick face mask once. “Negative.” He paused for another second and then continued, “The authority we have been given is no different from yours. If this head is cut off, I will die, and if I die, I will lose points. Once my points are exhausted, I will disappear from the Accelerated World.”

  “Then…why do you know things like that, that no one else knows?!”

  “That is also negative. I am not alone in knowing the name Trial Number Two. Of the Originators, there likely exist some who possess more information than I.”

  “…Origi…nators.” This wasn’t the first time he’d heard the word he parroted back. After the meeting of the Seven Kings four days earlier, the Red King Niko had uttered it in a trembling voice after appearing suddenly at his house. She hadn’t told him the specific meaning, but now he could hazard a guess. Most likely, the word indicated the first Burst Linkers, the ones without parents.

  Hey, Beast. In the back of his mind, Haruyuki unconsciously called to the destroyer lodged in the Armor. Whoever it was who first gave birth to you was an Originator, too, right? You know anything?

  In return, he heard an annoyed groan from the Beast, which had maintained its silence for several minutes even in the middle of the heated battle.

  GRAAAR…I DO NOT. I ALSO HAVE NO INTEREST. MY OBJECTIVE IS DESTRUCTION AND SLAUGHTER ALONE. YOU, TOO, WOULD DO BEST TO THINK OF NOTHING BUT THE SLAUGHTER OF THE ENEMY BEFORE YOU.

  This answer very nearly made Haruyuki smile wryly, but he got himself under control again before the grin reached his lips. The Beast might have been tame at that moment, but it had to have been vigilantly awaiting its chance to overtake Haruyuki over again. And more than that, Haruyuki was not Silver Crow now, but the sixth Chrome Disaster, so this was no time for laughing. He didn’t have the right to laugh, either.

  I get it, he murmured. But you have to know, even from that one blow, that I can’t beat this guy so easily as all that. And…something’s weird. Even if we do fight, I want to get as much information as I can before that.

  The response he got was the Beast simply returning a short howl, and then pulling back into the Armor.

  Haruyuki took a deep breath and switched gears, staring once more into Green Grandé’s eyes. The amber eye lenses, not allowing a single emotion to slip out, looked back at him quietly.

  “I get that for some reason, you’ve been trying to prolong the life of the Accelerated World, and that you’ve been hunting Enemies all this time by yourself to that end,” Haruyuki said, and then raised his voice. “But then why are you getting in my way now? It’s obvious that the Acceleration Research Society and the ISS kits are trying to destroy this world. I’m sure that building—Midtown Tower—is their base. My goal is to crush that base!”

  “I told you. Wait a while and you’ll see,” came the brief reply.

  The Green King turned his eyes up toward the building in question, soaring in the northeast, and reflexively, Haruyuki traced his gaze. Because Mori Tower was now half what it had been, the other tower seemed twice as tall. The blue-black spire had fallen silent; not a hint of activity could be seen.

  “I’ve waited plenty long. If you’re trying to buy time…,” Haruyuki started to say, until—

  Suddenly, far, far off in the eastern sky, he heard a mysterious sound. Like the rin
ging of an infinity of bells, the fleeting echo of thin glass shattering.

  Turning his gaze forty-five degrees to the right, Haruyuki saw a thin seven-colored veil rip through the thickly hanging clouds hanging low over the Demon City stage. The aurora—no, that wasn’t it. It was a light signaling the start of the end of the world.

  “…The Change,” he murmured, and the Green King nodded heavily. So this was what the king and Iron Pound had been waiting for?

  “The Change” referred to the phenomenon in the Unlimited Neutral Field of the switching of stage attributes—Demon City, Purgatory, Primal Forest. When the Change occurred, hunted Enemies repopped, and destroyed objects were completely recovered. Naturally, the appearance and terrain effects of the field were also completely transformed, and any duelers or Enemy hunters caught up in the Change were required to abruptly change strategies.

  The timing of the Change was random, but it was said that it happened at its quickest in three days of internal time (just over four minutes, real-world time) and within ten days at the latest. Since it was impossible to predict the timing, Green Grandé and Iron Pound must have been simply waiting in this place for days.

  But why?

  Even while Haruyuki tried to guess at their intention, the aurora wall approached at an incredible speed. When he looked closely, he could see that at the base of the light pouring down from the sky, the buildings crowded together in central Tokyo were instantly being overwritten with new colors and shapes.

  Without even a mere thirty seconds passing from the time he first heard the sound of it, the aurora had reached Roppongi Hills and painted everything in a glimmering rainbow, transmitting a faint pressure to Haruyuki as it did. Immediately, a sensation of ascent, like being in a high-speed elevator, enveloped his body—but he wasn’t flying with his own wings. Because the half-destroyed Mori Tower had started to rapidly regenerate, Haruyuki and the Green King were being pushed up to the roof, where they had originally stood. At the same time as their ascent stopped and his feet stepped onto the hard floor once more, the seven colors of the rainbow faded and disappeared.

  After watching the aurora wall charging off to the west, Haruyuki looked at his surroundings.

  The gloomy dark blue of the Demon City stage was completely gone. In its place, the world was dyed a concentrated muddy red. The ground and buildings were all gray tiles, but from the obvious seams oozed a viscous red liquid—in other words, blood seeped out, flowed, and pooled everywhere. The sky was also a garish red different from the sunset. The very infrequently occurring Deadly Sin stage.

  Unlike the Demon City, this stage had annoying attributes with a mountain of special effects, but of these, the one Burst Linkers had to be careful of was the fact that half of the damage done in direct physical attacks would bounce back at the attacker. In other words, it was very advantageous to long-range duel avatars. At least there weren’t any red types there now.

  Chiyu’s super bad at this stage. She’s probably freaking out and complaining right about now.

  After this momentary thought, Haruyuki forcefully cut off the flow of his thinking. If he thought even a little more about his friends in Nega Nebulus who were waiting for him at that very moment near the southern gates of the Castle, far off to the North, he had the feeling he would simply fly apart.

  Focusing on freezing his heart, he shifted his gaze and confirmed that the Green King was still in his daunting pose a little ways off before he opened his mouth.

  “So? The Change happened and now what?”

  Other than the slickly bloody exterior, nothing appeared to have changed with Midtown Tower rising up to the northeast. He still did not understand the Green King’s reason for blocking his approach.

  The reply to Haruyuki’s question came not from the king but a quiet voice behind him.

  “It means…we missed this time, too.”

  Turning around, Haruyuki saw the iron boxer sitting cross-legged in a pool of half-dried blood, dropping his shoulders lifelessly. It was Iron Pound, despite the fact that not even thirty minutes had passed since he was defeated by Haruyuki and died. Haruyuki thought, suspiciously, that it was too soon for Iron Pound to have regenerated—when he realized that the Change had one other effect: to ignore the sixty minutes of wait time for regeneration for Burst Linkers in the ghost state and bring them back to life.

  Although he had managed to get away with only half of the dull, boring regeneration standby, Pound didn’t seem the least bit pleased. The boxer rested his slack gloves on his legs, resigned.

  “Missed?” Haruyuki asked, furrowing his brow. “The Change now? What exactly were you guys waiting for?”

  “Did you know that to a certain extent, there’s a pattern in the change?”

  His question met with a question, Haruyuki’s scowl grew deeper. But he restrained himself and obediently shook his head.

  Pound nodded once and then continued, “Just like duel avatars, you can divide the various attributes of the duel stages into rough groups. You could say the Ice stage and the Drizzle stage are water types, Lava and Scorched Earth are fire types, Primeval Forest and Corroded Forest are wood types, and Demon City and Steel are metal types. On top of these so-called natural stages, you have dark types like Purgatory and Cemetery, and holy types like Aurora and Sacred Ground. You with me so far?”

  At these teacherly words, the Beast let out a groan of dissatisfaction before Haruyuki could, but thanks to that, Haruyuki himself lost the chance to be annoyed. When he silently gestured for the other avatar to continue, Iron Pound opened his mouth once more, standing up leisurely.

  “Normally, there aren’t two stages in a row belonging to the same overall category. And the appearance rates for the eight categories of earth, water, fire, wind, wood, metal, light, and dark are basically equal. But, rarely, only the first six natural categories go on for a long time. In that case, the dark-or holy-type stage that appears after that has a very high level of purity in the attributes. Basically, it’s incredibly evil or incredibly divine. There are some other, detailed rules, but this is the rough idea. Through our analysis of the long-term patterns, we predicted a super-evil stage would appear at this time today, and we were waiting for it.”

  “So then you’ve achieved your goal. There isn’t a stage more evil than Deadly Sin. It’s not a miss, it’s a bull’s-eye hit, isn’t it?” Haruyuki remarked.

  “That is true.” Pound nodded lightly before shaking his head slowly from side to side. “But…this still isn’t enough. What we need is the darkest of the dark, the ultimate evil…the Hell stage.”

  “…”

  It had been eight months now since he became a Burst Linker, and having reached level five, Haruyuki couldn’t be said to be a newbie anymore. But still, when it came to the Hell stage, he had heard the name only a few times. Since he had merely the haziest idea of its special effects and looks, he didn’t react immediately. From the explanation up to that point, though, he had learned nothing more than the fact that Iron Pound and Green Grandé had been waiting for something, but Iron Pound hadn’t said one word about why.

  “So you’re saying there’s some connection between the Unlimited Neutral Field turning into hell and you guys getting in my way here?” Haruyuki asked as he took a step forward from the tile oozing blood at his feet. It was getting harder to control his irritation.

  Standing a few meters ahead of him, Iron Pound slowly raised his right fist, mouth still closed. The iron glove, open until that moment, was clenched into a tight fist with a squeak.

  Haruyuki narrowed his eyes under his visor, but it appeared that Pound wasn’t trying for a rematch. He opened his left glove and held Haruyuki off, before turning his body toward Midtown Tower, soaring up five hundred meters to the northeast.

  “If you look at that, you’ll understand whether you like it or not,” the iron boxer murmured, striking a curious, very un-boxing-like pose. He spread both legs far apart, thrust his wide-open right hand straight ahe
ad, and placed his left hand on the elbow joint of his right arm.

  Immediately, an intense blue light effect enveloped the tightly clenched glove. A special attack. Reflexively, Haruyuki braced himself, but no line of predicted attack popped up from the Armor. Pound didn’t even glance at Haruyuki, who was holding his breath. Instead, he glared at the enormous spire dripping with blood off in the distance, as he shouted the technique name.

  “Rocket Straight!!”

  The boxer’s right arm exploded, just a little below the elbow.

  No, that wasn’t it—it jettisoned. The round glove and forearm cut away from the avatar and flew off, trailing bright-red flames. Even now that he had become the sixth Chrome Disaster, Haruyuki couldn’t help but be slightly baffled by this. This technique most certainly did not exist in traditional boxing, or any fighting technique, for that matter.

  So you’re not a Perfect Match boxer avatar? Haruyuki suppressed the urge to shout it and chased after the flying fist—the rocket punch—with his eyes.

  Whether it was orthodox or not, given that the technique took just five seconds from preparation to activation, it was wonderfully fast. It had an impact almost on par with the main artillery attack of the pure long-distance type, the Red King Scarlet Rain. Drawing out a long trail of smoke as it charged forward, the punch soared past the Shuto Expressway No. 3 and the buildings of Roppongi in the blink of an eye and closed in on Midtown Tower in the distance.

  At that moment, Haruyuki saw something move near the very top of the massive, sharply tapered tower. It was unbelievably big—that was all he knew. The reason he couldn’t pick out its precise size or shape was because it was almost completely transparent. Even with Disaster’s super resolution power, all he could see was the strange distortion of the red ambient light around the pinnacle.

  Straining his eyes intently, perhaps through some ability of the Armor or generosity of the Beast, the silhouette in the air where the light was distorted was emphasized and popped up clearly in his view. Colored a pale gray, the silhouette was strange: It was like a person, but also like a bird. It held tightly on to the tower with at least ten limbs, and an excessively round, enormous head turned toward the charging rocket punch.