Armor of Catastrophe

  Naturally, however, the cameras weren’t in the same locations permanently. The update speed in a semipublic place like a school was a bit lenient, but in places like shopping districts or back alleys, cameras were added and moved with incredible frequency, making it nearly impossible for professional criminals to always be aware of their range of view.

  But there were people who could perfectly identify random places outside the view of the cameras in a mere second. Burst Linkers. All a Burst Linker had to do was shout, “Burst Link,” and do a full dive into the clear blue, Basic Accelerated Field. In that world, things existing within view of the social cameras were reproduced as they were in reality, but for those items outside their view, the system “conjectured and complemented.” These items were basically reproduced as smooth objects with few details, so a Linker could tell at a glance whether something was within view of the cameras or not.

  This “privilege,” unattainable even to the leader of a large-scale criminal syndicate, had sent a small portion of Burst Linkers running toward a certain type of criminality. They were the ones called Physical Knockers, or PK for short. Several of them would target Burst Linkers outed in the real and attack them outside the view of the cameras. Initially, it was in the shadows, but in recent years, they would lock hapless Burst Linkers in cars and things, and in both cases, threaten them with violence and force them into direct duels. Unlike normal global net duels, there was no once-a-day limit in a direct duel, so the person being attacked was doomed to face loss after loss. In mere seconds of real-world time, the attackers stole a massive amount of points, and in the blink of an eye, the victim had lost everything, ending up in a forced uninstall of Brain Burst. It was a “death” for Burst Linkers that was even crueler than Unlimited EK in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

  Thus, Kuroyukihime had told Haruyuki to at least pay mind to the view of the cameras on the road. It might have been a little creepy, but the fact that he was able to see those black spheres around him meant he was safe. Although he didn’t expect to be attacked in the real when streams of students and office workers were flowing all around him. Yawning deeply, he called up the schedule for that day on his virtual desktop and went to check that he hadn’t forgotten some homework or report.

  At that moment, a hand stretched out from the gloom beneath the overhead train tracks immediately to the left of the sidewalk and grabbed on to the collar of Haruyuki’s shirt from behind.

  “Hinhk…?!”

  No way! PK?! A flat-out real attack when there are this many people, and in full view of the social cameras?! He began to freak out and very nearly started to wave and kick his arms and legs, but just as he was on the verge of doing so, a familiar voice whispered in his ear.

  “Hi.”

  A single word, a single syllable, likely the shortest of all possible greetings. He stopped flailing and nervously looked over his shoulder to find the face of a slightly older girl, with an adult look that somehow managed to provoke a sense that she was no ordinary person.

  “P-Pard?” he said, dumbfounded, but his attacker did not reply. It was self-evident, and there was no point in her replying. As usual, she was sticking to her style of finishing up anything conversation-related in the barest minimum time. At any rate, he left out the question of what she was even doing here and returned her greeting, collar still in her hand. “G-good morning.”

  She nodded lightly as she released him, and his floating heels hit the ground. Sighing, he turned around and took in the presence of his attacker once more.

  Her understated hairstyle was the same as always—black, parted in the middle, and bound in a single braid on her back. But she wasn’t wearing the maid’s uniform from the first time they had met, at a cake shop in Sakuradai in Nerima Ward, or the rough T-shirt and jeans look from when they met later at Tokyo Skytree. Instead, a white collar on a navy top, with a triangle scarf and a thin-pleated skirt of the same color—the typical sailor school uniform, in other words.

  It wasn’t a particularly unusual look. Looking around, he could see any number of uniforms like it among the students headed for the station. However, when the wearer was leaning up against the seat of a large electric motorcycle with a low, ferocious form like a large carnivore, it was a different story. The combination was just too out of place, and earned one gawking stare after another from the sidewalk.

  The bike was parked at the entrance to a narrow alley that passed under the overhead line and broke off to the south from the road Haruyuki took to school. To avoid the inquiring eyes, Haruyuki took a step into the dim alley and fumbled for what he was supposed to say. He didn’t know the real name of the uniformed rider who had suddenly appeared before him. The nickname “Pard” had slipped out but was normally not something to be used around regular people, because it was a contraction of her avatar name.

  Blood Leopard. The deputy of the Red Legion, Prominence, which ruled over the area from northern Nakano to Nerima, a level-six Burst Linker, nicknamed Bloody Kitty. A warrior among warriors, who had destroyed Rust Jigsaw of the Acceleration Research Society before Haruyuki’s eyes with a single bite.

  Now that he thought about it, she always appeared before him out of the blue and surprised him, but even still, this was just too sudden. Unable to decide on what to ask first, he flapped his mouth for about two and a half seconds. Then it was apparently the end of Haruyuki’s turn, and Pard leaned forward off the motorcycle, her left hand shooting out. In her fingertips was a small plug dangling from a red shielded cord—a direct XSB cable.

  He let out a mental cry, but since she’d end up jabbing it into his Neurolinker if he just stood there and watched, he hurriedly took it and jacked in himself with the cable that was fortunately two or so meters long. The wired connection warning popped up in his vision, and immediately after it disappeared, a slightly low, husky voice echoed in his mind.

  “I didn’t mail you because I have info I wanted to tell just you first.” Naturally, this was the answer to the question Haruyuki should have asked first. He looked up at her as she leaned back against her bike again and crossed her arms.

  He somehow managed to shift the gears in his brain and utter in neurospeak, “Does that mean you don’t want the other members of Nega Nebulus to know I saw you?”

  “That’s the end result, yes. It’s not that I don’t trust your comrades. I just wanted to let you decide what info to pass along.”

  Unable to immediately get what Leopard was trying to say, he cocked his head to one side. The cable connecting their Neurolinkers shook, and a hazy light slid along the shielded, braided wire.

  They might have been in the narrow lane beneath the tracks, but they were still in full view of the north side of the sidewalk. Haruyuki wondered what people made of the high school girl in a sailor-style uniform leaned up against a large motorcycle with a short, round junior high boy, directing and staring at each other first thing in the morning. Old, young, boy, girl—the people passing by gazed at them freely, and frighteningly, he glimpsed Umesato uniforms among them, but the words Leopard uttered next contained enough of a shock to send all these scattered thoughts easily flying.

  “Silver Crow. There’s a movement to ask a PK group for your immediate purge.”

  “What…,” he gasped, his real voice slipping out. He staggered for a moment, and then quickly regained his footing. But the sensation that the ground was slowly swaying did not leave him.

  Seeing him like this, Pard twitched an eyebrow and stretched out her right hand once more. She pulled on Haruyuki’s shoulder and sat him up on the front of the motorcycle seat, immediately to her right. The large bike, firmly supported by a solid kickstand, didn’t move an inch even as it took his full weight.

  Slightly regaining his calm from the reliable feel of the machine he had ridden several times, Haruyuki finally sent his next thought through the cable. “Purge…This is because of the Armor of Catastrophe thing, right? But at the Meeting of the Seven Kings, they said I’d have
this whole week.”

  “Yes. However, the ones talking the extreme talk aren’t the kings, but some of the key Burst Linkers under them. They’re insisting…that you’re the source of the infection of the ‘dark power’ that’s been spreading through the Accelerated World these last few days.” Even the indomitable Pard showed the merest hint of hesitation before speaking those words.

  However, paying no mind to this, Haruyuki trapped an even larger gasp in his throat. “That’s—N-no, I…” Reflexively, he looked up at Leopard standing to his left and shook his head violently. “They’re wrong! It’s not me! I—I would never make something like that…”

  But even as he protested the idea, a voice came back to life in the distance in his mind. Ash Roller’s final words in the closed duel the morning before, very near where they were now on Kannana Street.

  “There’s more to the rumors I heard. This ‘weird tech’ Utan and Olive are using…I heard it’s a copy of Chrome Disaster’s power.”

  It was true that the shadowy aura emitted by users of the ISS kit and the dark fluctuations that blanketed Silver Crow when he equipped the Armor of Catastrophe did strongly resemble each other. Someone who saw both of them could determine that they were of the same origin. Still, a single day was much too little time for this rumor to race around the Accelerated World and grow into talk of an immediate purge of Silver Crow.

  At the same time, though, Haruyuki could see that it wasn’t necessarily impossible. For Burst Linkers, a mere 1.8 seconds in the real world was actually equivalent to thirty minutes. If the rumor was spread among the members of the Gallery at the countless duels happening one after another in Shinjuku, in Shibuya, in Akihabara, it was plenty believable that some people espousing strong views on the matter had already appeared. Believable, but in his heart, he simply could not accept it.

  Pard watched as Haruyuki opened his eyes wide and shook his head in short, sharp increments, and a faint but definite smile rose up onto her lips. The right hand that had trapped his collar before now patted his back lightly. “K, got it. Red King and me, we don’t believe the ranting and raving. But we can’t be optimistic, either. Which is why I came to give you the info.”

  Words weren’t quick to come out. But the softness and warmth of the hand touching him through the fabric of his shirt pushed back the shock and terror, even if it was only for the moment.

  The Red Legion, Prominence, had what was basically a temporary cease-fire with Haruyuki’s Nega Nebulus, although this certainly didn’t mean they had formed an alliance. When he met the Legion Master, Niko, she had contacted Haruyuki in the real world and forcefully requested their help in subjugating the fifth Chrome Disaster, but she had paid back that debt with interest when they were dealing with Dusk Taker, so at present, their relationship could be said to be completely even. Which was why, for Prominence, there was no longer any obligation to maintain the cease-fire with Nega Nebulus, especially not to the point of incurring the displeasure of the other five great Legions. In fact, it wasn’t hard to imagine that some people within the Legion were probably already of the opinion that they should resume attacks in the weekend Territories.

  And yet Niko and Pard continued as they had, not fighting, and more than that, they would even go out of their way, like Pard was doing now, to inform him of a direct danger in the real. Probably—definitely as a friend.

  “Thank. You.” Haruyuki spoke these words alone, not just with his thoughts, but also with his real voice. Using the back of his hand to rub away the tears welling up in his eyes, he got himself back on track. The way to respond to Pard’s kindness wasn’t to pointlessly freak out and practically cry on her; it was to calmly grasp the situation and handle it in the best way possible. He took a deep breath and switched back to neurospeak.

  “But even if they are talking PK, it’s not as easy as all that, right? I mean, they have to out me in the real first.”

  “Yes. The PK groups don’t have an inexhaustible supply of points, either, so they can’t use extreme methods like Rain did before to get in touch with you in the real world.”

  “…That’s true.”

  Niko had used the fact that in reality, she was in elementary school and systematically applied for hands-on school visits at the junior high schools in Suginami Ward, where she got temporary accounts on the local nets and checked the matching list to pin down the school Silver Crow was enrolled at. Next, she set up camp where she could look out at the school gates and accelerated each time a student came out on their way home after school to check the matching list, eventually cracking Haruyuki’s identity in the real. The number of points she used in the process was not on the level of a hundred or two hundred; this method was impossible for anyone who wasn’t a king and no longer needed to be diligent about points to level up.

  So then how exactly were the people espousing this strong opinion planning to PK Haruyuki?

  He furrowed his brow, and Pard, next to him, also looked as though she was thinking. “Right now,” she muttered, “the only ones outside the current members of Nega who know your real name are me and Niko. That right?”

  He nodded after a moment’s hesitation. “Yeah. You should be.” To be more accurate, if they were talking about “knew in the past,” then there was actually one more person. Dusk Taker, the marauder who had appeared at Umesato Junior High as a new student that year and overwhelmed Haruyuki and his friends while Kuroyukihime was away. But Haruyuki and Takumu had defeated him in a decisive battle in the Unlimited Neutral Field, and he lost all his points and had Brain Burst forcibly uninstalled. His memories related to the Accelerated World had been completely erased, and he was currently aware of Haruyuki only as someone he used to play some game with.

  Of course, the possibility that he passed along Haruyuki’s real-world info to the organization he belonged to, the Acceleration Research Society, was not zero. But if he had, then he ran the risk of exposing his own identity, since they went to the same junior high school. Given how utterly and completely Dusk Taker rejected values like friendships and bonds, Haruyuki couldn’t believe he would have trusted the members of his organization that much.

  Leopard moved her head lightly. “You’ll just have to trust me and Niko, but if that’s all of us, then those hard-liners won’t crack you so easily. If you…purify the armor before the Meeting of the Seven Kings on Sunday and the kings confirm it, the idea of purging you will be totally baseless. But there is just one thing…” Unusually for her, Pard trailed off and turned her whole upper body toward Haruyuki, before continuing in a deeply apprehensive voice, “There is just one force of concern.”

  “Force?”

  “We assume there are several PK groups out there, but it’s not easy to find out who’s in them. Put another way, once they are found out, they’re purged with the collective power of all Burst Linkers and lose all their points before they even know it.”

  Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down. His teacher Sky Raker had also smilingly informed him that she had tossed a Burst Linker who had been identified as a PK deep into the territory of a Legend-class Enemy. PKs were so detestable that even the (supposedly) kind Raker adopted such merciless methods. In which case, how was it even possible in the first place to make a request to these guys to purge Haruyuki? First of all, how did the would-be purgers get in touch with the PK?

  Leopard replied to Haruyuki’s question with a low, stifled thought. “There’s a group that fancy themselves ‘executioners.’ They’re the sole PK group who’ve made the group name known. The most malicious and evil physical knockers. Supernova Remnant, Remnant for short.”

  “Supernova Remnant,” he parroted.

  “They take on PKs in Japanese yen instead of burst points,” Leopard added, a faint grimness rising up onto her normally cool brow. “They have a ton of know-how about cracking the real. Every Burst Linker they’ve been contracted to execute has without exception been taken out with a PK. For them, Brain Burst’s not a game; it’s no
thing more than a way to earn money.”

  “Wha…” Once more, Haruyuki gasped in his real voice, this time unconsciously.

  “Why…” A chill running up his spine, he racked his brain as if to try and fight back. “Why are they just left to do that? If anyone’s going to be purged, shouldn’t we start with them instead of me…”

  “Naturally, people have said the same thing many times in the past. But no matter what anyone does, no one can get ahold of any of the members. The way you place the order, you send a money code together with the target’s name and information to an anonymous mail address. It just might be they don’t do normal duels at all and just level up through PK. In which case, it’s totally possible they are completely mysterious Burst Linkers known to no one.”

  “Th-that’s…So then it’s almost like they’re ghosts—no, gods of death, aren’t they…” Haruyuki let out this futile thought, backside still resting lightly against the seat of the electric bike.

  Leopard affirmed his words with a short silence and then gently touched his back again. “This is all still guesswork. You don’t need to be excessively scared. The biggest risk for outing in the real is information leaked by a ‘parent’ or ‘child,’ and you don’t have a child—” At this point, Pard cocked her head momentarily as if to say, You don’t, right? and Haruyuki hurriedly bobbed his head up and down. “And your parent’s the king of your Legion, not to mention a seasoned veteran. She wouldn’t carelessly let something slip or sell you out. So in such a short time, even for those would-be executioners, outing you in the real’s impossible.”

  The thoughts flowing through the cable stopped there for a moment. But Haruyuki understood that Pard had chopped just a bit off the end of her sentence. Outing you in the real’s impossible, I think. That’s what she had actually been going to say. Because if she was convinced that it was absolutely impossible, there would have been no need to come all the way over like this and warn him. But she’d made it a declaration, perhaps to give Haruyuki strength.