Armor of Catastrophe

  Copyright

  ACCEL WORLD, Volume 7

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Jocelyne Allen

  Cover art by HIMA

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ACCEL WORLD

  © REKI KAWAHARA 2011

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in 2011 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2016 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: November 2017

  Originally published in paperback in September 2016 by Yen On.

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-9753-0089-0

  E3-20171027-JV-PC

  1

  Blackout.

  Spotlight.

  In the circle of white light: an enormous matte column, painted scarlet. Leaning back against its curved surface: a small doll, not a real person. The doll’s body is covered in metal armor of a silver hue, head encased in a helmet of the same.

  A faint light grows to illuminate the surroundings. Nighttime. Countless bonfires flicker silently. The initial red column is not the only one; similar pillars stretch out in a seemingly endless row. The ground is blanketed by snow-white gravel. In the distant background, the silhouette of a massive palace looms. The silver helmet moves to gaze at the faraway castle.

  …It’s not “absolutely impregnable.” Not even close.

  He couldn’t help grumbling to himself, even though he was only too aware that this was totally a “reap what you sow” kind of situation.

  He couldn’t voice this complaint out loud. Actually, he couldn’t even allow himself the soft crunch of a single footstep. The instant he made the slightest sound, the terrifying samurai-type Enemies parading around within the fortress might descend on him and attack all at once.

  Each samurai was at most three meters tall. Enemies five times that size in the Beast class that lived in the world outside were not at all unusual. But the samurai, strutting through the long hallways and the tops of the castle walls in groups of three or four, armor clanging, emitted a concentrated pressure greater than Beasts, on par with Legends—or even the Four Gods standing guard at the gates of the palace.

  Naturally, the fact that he had been able to get into the inner sanctuary of the palace—the solemn Castle reaching to the heavens in the center of the Unlimited Neutral Field—was precisely because he had breached the guard of those Four Gods. That said, however, this in no way meant he would be able to defeat even one of those samurai. Rather than breaching the guard of the Gods, it would be more accurate to say he had found a gap to sneak in through or, perhaps, made it inside through mere chance.

  There has to at least be a leave portal in here, he told himself silently, to push back the fear and anxiety filling his heart.

  Reflecting the light of the torches inside the Castle, his metal avatar was frozen right through, his heart echoing as it pounded beneath the somewhat dull silver of his armor. He was clearly in a desperate situation, the biggest crisis of his life as a BB player.

  Still, he couldn’t deny that he felt just the tiniest bit excited.

  It had already been eleven months since the birth of the Accelerated World—since Brain Burst, the full-dive fighting game application created by an unknown developer, had been distributed to approximately one hundred first-grade students living in the heart of Tokyo. Many players, after reaching level four during that time and thereby earning the right to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field, challenged the massive palace enthroned in the center of this world. Given that it was in a location that corresponded to the Imperial Palace in the real world, and the supreme gravitas of the structure (surrounded as it was by cliffs), it obviously had to be the final objective of the game—in the words of a child, the last boss’s castle.

  But the challenges of every Burst Linker had been knocked aside with a single breath by the terrifying super Enemies, the Four Gods.

  Genbu in the north. Seiryu in the east. Byakko in the west. And Suzaku in the south. While each was an independent Enemy with a five-level HP gauge, they also had the ability to support and heal one another. Specifically, the Gods not in combat sent buffers and heals to those fighting at the other gates with alarming force, which meant that players could not focus their fighting strength to crush each God individually. They also had to split their forces up and simultaneously attack all four. But that sort of large-scale strategy was not possible when the total number of Burst Linkers still had not reached five hundred, and these few players were divided into countless tiny Legions that were constantly wrangling with one another. In some cases, players who dared to challenge the Gods had taken a small-scale squad to charge one of the gates, only to die well onto the bridge, where they fell into Unlimited Enemy Death—although the term was not coined until later—and lost all their burst points.

  Given all this, it only made sense that he’d be the tiniest bit thrilled at being inside the Castle, despite the fact that he hadn’t actually defeated the Four Gods.

  If he could push on and reach the depths of the palace to get his hands on the final flag item there—whatever it was—perhaps his name would be forever etched into the narrative of the Accelerated World as the first person to clear Brain Burst.

  He, a subdued metal color possessed of no significant abilities, was never paid any particular attention by anyone. His name—

  Chrome Falcon.

  Although his avatar name was kind of cool with the falcon bit, or maybe because of that, Chrome Falcon’s abilities and appearance had long been deemed to not live up to that name. And not just by his duel opponents; he thought so himself.

  The only part of his avatar that resembled a bird of prey was the mask, which tapered to a sharp point at the bottom in the shape of a beak. His face was a smooth silver with no eye lenses, and he couldn’t shake the impression that this made him look like someone’s underling. His body was long and slender; his limbs had nothing in the way of weapons. Naturally, there was nothing that even hinted at wings on his back.

  The only person who said his duel avatar—which had nothing but the attack abilities of Punch and Kick, the speed that came from being small, and the hardness of his body—was “amazing” was his tag-team partner, Saffron Blossom. He believed her sincerity in saying so, but at the very least, he wished he had something to complement her abilities.

  Blossom had, as her name suggested, the power to make flowers bloom. She shot
different kinds of seeds from a small stick in her right hand and embedded them in the Enemy—or an ally avatar. The flowers that bloomed after a certain period of time manifested a variety of effects, such as eating up health or special-attack gauges, stopping legs, or, conversely, applying buffer effects or removing debuffing effects. Critical gossips called this a “parasitic attack” and other unpleasant things, but even among other yellow colors, a duel avatar as all-purpose as she was was hard to find.

  Of course, if a player had that much power, then naturally some other part of their skill set would have to be sacrificed, and in Blossom’s case, it was her fairly unreliable defensive power. To compensate for this weakness, she tag-teamed with the hard, metallic Falcon, and even after nearly six months of fighting together, that anxiety still lived in his heart. The anxiety about what would happen if someone even harder came along and invited Blossom to partner up.

  The metallic color wheel, separate from the so-called normal color wheel, had the precious metals platinum and gold on the far left, and the base metals steel and iron on the right. Precious, base—regardless, the potential was the same if the level was, with placement on the left side being stronger against special attacks with poison, acid, or corrosion, and the farther right you went, the stronger the avatar was against physical attacks from punching or swords.

  Chrome was basically in the center. Not having much resistance one way or the other, this metallic color existed in no small numbers, excelling only in the simple hardness of its armor. In fact, it wouldn’t be at all strange to come across a better shield among the normal colors, in the defensive-oriented green line.

  In other words, given that all he had was the fact that he was a hard metal, he had no idea when Blossom would be taken from him.

  He himself couldn’t quite grasp what this feeling was blocking his chest. While he had somehow managed to survive up to that point in a stronghold in the bay area of the Accelerated World, and other players had recently given him the nickname Black Eagle, when he burst out, he was still just an eight-year-old boy in second grade. Or maybe that was just an excuse, too: He had already spent nearly five years of subjective time in this world of no time limits since earning the right to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field.

  So he did actually understand it somewhere in his mind. Understand why the other day, when he finally reached level five and obtained a certain special attack, he had immediately thought of the Castle…And why he had acted on that idea, why he was in this tight spot now, holding his breath, surrounded by countless terrifying Enemies. All of it was for his love of Saffron Blossom and his desire to monopolize her.

  If he didn’t move soon, one of the samurai groups that moved around within the palace in a fixed pattern would show up in this hiding spot. He poked the edge of his mask out from the shadow of the crimson pillar and took a quick peek at the situation.

  His current location was a corner of the main road that connected the Suzaku gate and the main entrance of the palace itself. It was in the southern area of the Castle’s inner garden, which in and of itself was a circle fifteen hundred meters in diameter. On both sides of the entrance, Enemies sat in wait, looking more like fierce gods than samurai with their extremely vicious countenances; there was no way he could break through them. He decided instead to set his sights on one of the windows in the white walls. Given that this was not an established route, there was a strong possibility that they couldn’t be opened from the outside, but if it would just please be a real window, he should be able to get inside.

  He heard the footfalls of a group of samurai Enemies on patrol approaching from behind. Taking a deep breath, he put his right foot forward and very quietly said the name of his technique.

  “Flash Blink.”

  Perhaps picking up even this quiet utterance with their sharp ears, the samurai quickened into a run.

  By then, however, the dark silver avatar had already completely disappeared from behind the pillar. Vanishing temporarily, leaving nothing but a blue afterimage, he materialized silently along the wall of the Castle, thirty meters away.

  This was Chrome Falcon’s level-five special attack, a pseudoteleportation. Pseudo because it was an extension of the ability to move in a straight line at high speeds, so he could only move to somewhere he could see that was connected in space. But while moving, his avatar changed into a particle with zero mass, and physical and gravitational attacks were completely ineffective.

  He reappeared with his back pressed up against the white wall and watched the samurai Enemies swarming the place he had been moments before. Having lost the intruder that was the target of their aggression, they swiveled their heads wildly in an attempt to regain their prey, but eventually, they returned to their original patrol route as if all was forgotten and began walking at a leisurely pace again. He heaved a sigh of relief. The attack AI of the samurai Enemies, at any rate, was clearly not on par with the Four Gods.

  Glancing back, he looked up at the large window in the wall behind him.

  He had been anticipating this, since the Field’s attribute was the Japanese Heian–style stage, but the window was indeed just red latticework incorporated into the wall lengthwise, with nothing resembling glass in it. Since one square was only about three centimeters on any given side, there wasn’t a duel avatar out there who could slip through this gap in their given form, but…

  He glanced up and checked his special-attack gauge in the upper left of his field of view. Five percent remaining. There was also only 20 percent left in his health gauge, but either way, a single blow from the sword of a samurai Enemy would mean instant death, even if his gauge were full.

  He carefully decided on a trajectory, planted his right foot forward, and used up the last of his gauge for a final Flash Blink.

  The particulate body of Chrome Falcon slipped through the narrow gap in the frame and finally made it into the actual Imperial Palace.

  It was this ability that had made it possible for him to fool the Four Gods and break through the absolutely impenetrable outer walls of the palace. The method he devised had been exceedingly simple: After charging up his special-attack gauge in advance, he headed first toward not the large bridges guarded by the Four Gods but the outer moat filled with infinite darkness surrounding the palace, where he Blinked the maximum distance. That said, even using up his entire gauge, the maximum he could travel was a hundred meters, not even close to being enough to cross the five-hundred-meter-wide palisade.

  Because of this, he set his initial trajectory a bit higher up in the sky. The instant he reappeared above the palisade, the indisputable force of gravity caught hold of his avatar and tried to drag him to the bottom of the ravine, crunching away at his HP gauge. However, since this simultaneously recharged his special-attack gauge, he Blinked again diagonally into the sky once his gauge had reached a certain point. Then it was a matter of repeating this to cross the valley.

  All that was well and good, but the truth was he had planned to simply experiment today in the name of reconnaissance. Once he confirmed that the cycle of Blink, charge, Blink was indeed possible, he had intended to fall to his death at the bottom of the ravine. He’d be regenerated in front of the palisade, and he could reexamine his plan based on the information he obtained. Once he was certain it was possible to actually implement, he would come back to take on the challenge of the real thing.

  That was how it was supposed to go, at least, but here he was on his first try, on this reckless suicide mission, because falling into an infinite valley had been an unbelievably terrifying experience. He completely forgot himself on the first fall and continually and intently Blinked forward, so that before he knew it, he was clinging to the exterior wall in a trance.

  The results were exactly what he’d been hoping for, but he didn’t get the chance to stand around and pat himself on the back.

  While these eleven months since the beginning of the Accelerated World were a history of the fights among the children
who became Brain Burst players, they were at the same time also a history of the conflict between all players and the mysterious game developer. The children turned all their youthful enthusiasm toward seeking out holes in the system—finding ways to earn delicious points—and the moment they found one, the developer plugged it up with an update patch. Any point-earning tech that had the faintest whiff of deceit such as Enemy Stalking or Tool Cheating (using external programs in the real world within the game) was dealt with so fast, it was surprising compared with other net games, and they could no longer use it. From the speed of this reaction, more than a few players insisted that it wasn’t a human who developed and ran BB, but rather an AI.

  At any rate, the unknown developer appeared to be firm in their refusal to allow any back doors or shortcuts. And more than that, this developer sternly demanded payment equal to whatever the player was trying to gain in the Accelerated World.

  Which meant that there was absolutely no way the developer was going to approve of Chrome Falcon flying over the moat to break into the impenetrable Castle, rather than going through the proper route through one of the four gates. A patch would be applied soon enough, and the super gravity of that palisade would be able to grab hold of even Flash Blink, a technique impervious to physical and gravitational effects. Maybe it was already being fixed at that very moment.

  So this was his first and last chance.

  I’m going to get something or do something here, and become a Burst Linker worthy of partnering with Saffron Blossom. So that I won’t have to live in fear of losing her anymore. So that I make her happy she chose me.

  And, more than anything else, to pay her back for talking to me and reaching out to me, when I did nothing but look down at the ground in this world, just like in the real one.

  Once he slipped in through the window frame, he was met with beautifully polished wooden floors and an inside wall made up of sliding fusuma doors, adorned with gorgeous color prints. Candlesticks stood at evenly spaced intervals, orange flames flickering quietly. No sign of any Enemies at the moment.