Haruyuki moved to clap his hands together as well, but Manganese continued to speak, so he stopped himself and looked at her.
“It’s only been three days since Wolfram Cerberus appeared in the areas of Shibuya Number One, Shinjuku Number Three, and Nakano Number Two here. Given that you had your hands full with purifying the armor, it’s no wonder you didn’t know.”
“R-right. I hadn’t even heard his name before today.”
“But the impact he’s having is even bigger than when Dusk Taker was rampaging in Shinjuku and Shibuya two months ago. His strength, though, was understandable when you saw the combo of his long-distance firepower and the flight he stole from you, but…”
“Th-that—I’m sorry about that time,” Haruyuki apologized without thinking. Hearing the name of the Twilight Marauder in this unexpected place had that effect.
Manganese looked at him with exasperated eyes and snorted. “You were a victim of that, too. At any rate, unlike Taker, you can’t see the bottom of this strength of Cerberus’s.”
“Huh? Isn’t it just that he’s super hard because he’s the metal-color tungsten?”
“He’s hard. But his way of fighting isn’t really hard. Normally, a level-one chick insists on their own abilities and has a narrow field of view, so their fighting style is stiff. Like how you used to focus just on your flying and always get shot down by Red snipers, Crow.”
“R-right. I really am sorry.” Reflexively, he apologized once more, and Manganese responded with another snort before continuing her explanation.
“But Cerberus there only uses the hardness that is his greatest strength in places where it’s most effective. The reason this duel was resolved in such a short time is because that impulsive idiot Horn suddenly charged him head-on. But…a normal level one in that situation, no matter how much they believed in their own hardness, I doubt they would have been able to meet him in earnest without even hesitating.”
“It’s true, he did meet Horn’s powerful shoulder charge with his own head butt without so much as flinching. When I was level one, I would have been running around for twenty-five minutes.”
At his own words, he suddenly became concerned and checked the timer in the lower center of his field of view. It had started at 1,800 seconds, and he was a little surprised that there were still nearly 1,000 seconds left. Looking around him, he saw that more than half of the Gallery had already left the stage, and Cerberus, the issue at hand, appeared to be operating his own Instruct menu on the road. This space would not disappear until the time ran out or he burst out.
Also turning her eyes down to the road, Manganese narrowed her eye lenses fiercely and lowered her voice. “…He doesn’t appear to be accompanied by a parent or belong to any Legion. So then where did he learn that duel sense? Or if he was able to fight like that on his own right from the start, then his true power isn’t the hardness of tungsten, but…”
“…But…?” Haruyuki gulped the throat of his avatar and waited for her to continue.
“…But maybe that he’s a genius. A natural talent who’s been given everything necessary for the duel—no, for a Burst Linker—right from the start.”
Genius. The instant he heard that word, Haruyuki felt a soft part of his heart wither suddenly. Because, for the human being Haruyuki Arita, this was the word most unconnected with him. At every opportunity, Kuroyukihime told him that his speed was a talent no one else had. But he knew better than anyone that this speed—his reaction speed in a VR environment—was absolutely not something he had been born with.
Ever since he was little, Haruyuki had fled to the virtual world to forget about his unpleasant reality and spent a great deal of his time with a variety of VR games. His reaction speed was nothing more than something polished and refined through that. His high score in the squash game corner in the Umesato local net that had drawn Kuroyukihime’s eyes to him was also nothing but a number built up because he hid in that place to escape his bullies.
It was a fact that that speed had given his Accelerated World duel avatar the unique flight ability. However, the reason Haruyuki had been able to overcome all kinds of crises without losing all his points up to that day was exactly because of the many, utterly many people who had helped him. There probably wasn’t one problem he had solved alone under his own power. The current mission to obtain the Theoretical Mirror ability was the same. Even though Niko and Utai had been kind enough to diligently show him the path, he had finally only been able to see a single hazy hint—
“Honestly. This and that all at once, it’s too much!” Manganese exploded abruptly, interrupting Haruyuki’s negative thoughts.
“A-all at once?” he asked, jerking his head up.
“That’s right. You have the creepy generation of the ISS kits, the transfer of the Archangel Metatron, and now the appearance of Wolfram Cerberus. All these things have happened in the last week.”
“R-right. That’s true.”
“Given all this, I should actually say it’s fortuitous that we took care of everything concerning the issue of your Armor of Catastrophe yesterday. I don’t even want to imagine the situation where you have a bounty on your head and we have to send a team to subjugate you. Not that I’m thanking you or anything, though!”
“W-well, of course, no.” As he bowed his head, the thought suddenly popped into his mind: He could maybe say that he had only fought just the slightest bit under his own power to purify the Armor of Catastrophe aka the Disaster. It wasn’t a problem to have a lot of people helping him, but there had to be one or two situations where he stood firm on his own. Even if he didn’t have a natural talent, he was growing bit by bit, for sure. With that thought, he managed to cheer himself up just the tiniest bit, and Haruyuki bowed his head unconsciously to Manganese once more. “Um. Th-thank you.”
“…You have no reason to thank me.”
“Oh, I—I guess so. Ha-ha-ha!”
Perhaps Cerberus on the road had finished with his Instruct while they were talking; he suddenly looked up at the Gallery, down to ten or so people now, and called out in a voice that carried, “Well then, I’ll take my leave of you here! Thank you so much for watching!!”
Normally, the Gallery was for having fun watching duels or gathering information on an opponent you would fight one day, so there was really no need for a thank-you here, but with Cerberus’s too-fresh attitude, everyone responded unthinkingly with another round of applause.
Finally, the gray metal color bowed neatly once more and raised his voice. “Burst O—”
He stopped halfway through.
Haruyuki realized the wolfish face mask was looking in their direction, and he unconsciously tried to hide behind Manganese. But before he could, the clear voice of the boy reached the roof of the building.
“Um, please excuse me if I’m mistaken! Standing up there…are you perhaps Silver Crow of Nega Nebulus, by any chance?!”
Gah! He threw his head back. If it had been just the two of them, he surely would have shaken his head swiftly back and forth and said, “You’ve got the wrong avatar.” But starting with Manganese, all the other remaining members of the Gallery would certainly have been aware that it was Silver Crow standing there, so he couldn’t even come close to pulling that off.
He had no choice. In a relatively smooth voice, he replied in a mumble, “Y-yes, well…I guess, yeah.”
Cerberus immediately ran up to the spot directly below him at street level and shouted even more forcefully, “It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’ve wanted to meet you for so long! When I reach level two, I was thinking about coming to visit the Suginami area. I never dreamed I’d see you here today. I’m overwhelmed!”
“Th-th-that’s very nice of you…” Although he had been told many times that “it was a pleasure to be able to shoot you down,” he had never gotten “I’m overwhelmed to meet you,” so Haruyuki simply pulled his head in, unsure of how exactly he should respond. He couldn’t decide whether he should he run away
right then and there, or if he should continue the conversation a little longer.
The words that Cerberus uttered next stabbed right through him.
“I have a request, Crow! Please duel with me now!!”
10
There were two ways in the system to connect directly with the next duel rather than ending a duel. One was to switch into Battle Royale mode to bring the many members of the Gallery into a one-on-one duel as duelers. Because this only worked if all the members of the Gallery agreed to the switch, it didn’t happen very often.
And the other method was that the winner could immediately start the next duel by challenging a member of the Gallery once the regular duel was over. Since there wasn’t the added work of quitting acceleration and then reaccelerating, it seemed to be quite convenient, but this too almost never happened. The reason was the fact that the challenger’s side using up a Burst point remained unchanged—and the fact that a series of duels was mentally hard on a person.
Fights in the Accelerated World inevitably brought a fairly deep exhaustion compared with general full-dive-type duel games. It wasn’t because time was accelerated by a thousand, but rather because of the diverse duel stages and overwhelming freedom of movement, along with the strategizing to go up against duel avatars that never had a single thing in common. Even when they were not in contact with the enemy, the duelers had to intently rack their brains and concentrate with everything they had for when they did cross swords again. It had already been eight months since Haruyuki became a Burst Linker, and if he fought for a full thirty minutes, he ended up almost slumping down to the floor upon his return to the real world. Even the successive Chrome Disasters, feared as the most extreme berserker, had been unable to withstand the exhaustion of endless battles in succession and been dispersed.
Thus, the majority of Burst Linkers disconnected their Neurolinkers from the global net immediately after finishing a duel and took a break of at least a few minutes. Although he was level one, Wolfram Cerberus couldn’t have been unaware of this, given that this was not his first duel. And yet, without showing even a hint of hesitation, he had challenged Haruyuki. It wasn’t just about winning or losing, either; the small avatar was spilling over with the pure desire to fight Silver Crow and was waiting for Haruyuki’s response.
In this situation, do I have the right to say, “No thanks”? I don’t really.
Muttering in his heart, Haruyuki glanced at the health gauge in the top left of his field of view. The name inscribed below it was Silver Crow. The right side was Wolfram Cerberus. The timer in the middle had a full 1,700 seconds remaining. In other words, Haruyuki had accepted the challenge from the newcomer prodigy with the super-hard tungsten armor, praised as a “genius” by the senior member of the Leonids, Manganese Blade.
He had actually come to Nakano Area No. 2 to duel, and when he connected his Neurolinker to the global net, he had resolved to fight whatever opponent came at him. But given that this opponent was a nonstandard Burst Linker who, at level one, had pulverized a level-five opponent head-on, it was a different story. At the very least, he wanted to fight him after watching in the Gallery two or three—no, five or six—times…
“Don’t chicken out now!” he scolded himself quietly and stared at the guide cursor in the center of his field of view.
From Cerberus’s attitude, even if they hadn’t run into each other on this stage, there was a strong possibility that he would have challenged him the instant he found Silver Crow on the matching list. Given that, Haruyuki should feel fortunate to be in this situation instead, in which he knew, albeit if only slightly, the characteristics of his opponent. He would forget about the level difference and fight with everything he had. This was a matter of courtesy toward Cerberus, who had stood tall and challenged him directly.
After about a hundred seconds, Haruyuki succeeded in getting the restless train of his thoughts onto a new track, and once again took a look at his surroundings. The buildings, which had until a few minutes earlier had organic shapes, were now transformed into structures made of straight-lined iron skeletons and flat steel panels. With the start of the Crow-versus-Cerberus duel, the stage changed from Purgatory to Steel. The characteristics of this stage were that all terrain objects were more or less hard, that the effects of electricity and magnetism were enhanced, and that footsteps echoed strangely. Silver Crow was weak against electricity, so when his opponent was that kind of avatar, he had to be careful of electric shock attacks through the terrain, but there was no need for that now. Probably.
Actually, what required his attention was probably the footsteps. Metal-color avatars had the weak point of making more noise when moving than normal colors. It was impossible for both Haruyuki and his enemy to run in this Steel stage without making any noise. Given the complexity of the terrain, the sound of movement would no doubt be a key point in the contest. The members of the Gallery—more than thirty people once again—likely understood that since, unlike the previous Horn-versus-Cerberus fight, they were looking down from the roofs of the surrounding buildings at the battlefield in silence.
At that moment, the guide cursor disappeared from his field of view. “…Oh, there,” Haruyuki muttered to himself. At the start of the duel, the two of them had been randomly relocated. Haruyuki’s current position was basically the northern edge of the stage, on the east side of the road to Nakano Broadway. Cerberus had originally been coming straight at him from the west, but because the large shopping center rose up in the compass direction, he had no choice but to come around from the north or the south. Entry into buildings was permitted in a Steel stage, but that didn’t mean anything since there was no entrance along the eastern wall of Broadway.
North or south? Murmuring in his head, Haruyuki focused the entirety of his attention on his ears.
The strategy Haruyuki had come up with was extremely simple: wedge himself in between the indestructible edifices and limit his enemy’s path of movement to two options. And then, by further narrowing that down to an attack that created sound, he was aiming for a surprise first attack. His own footsteps would also make noise, but Silver Crow had a weapon called a Long Jump, which made use of his wings. It should be just barely possible for him to glide soundlessly to the southern or northern corner of the building.
So then…which way are you coming?! He pressed his back up against the wall of the building, made up of thick iron plates, and waited for the sound of metal against metal to reach his ears.
A few seconds later, he heard it. But the direction wasn’t north or south—it was east. In other words, right behind Haruyuki.
Skreenk! Together with an ear-splitting sound of destruction, a gray fist ripped through the iron plate and shot into Silver Crow’s right shoulder. The shock was like being hit with a large-caliber bullet. He was sent flying forward, spinning, and his back slammed into the road.
Shooting sparks as he came to a stop, Haruyuki stared, dumbstruck, as the fist protruding from the exterior wall of the building was quickly pulled back. Before he even had the chance to recover from his shock, a second, even more intense roar of destruction shook the air. This time, the steel plate, likely five centimeters thick, ripped open in concentric waves, and an entire avatar came flying out.
The buildings of the stage should have been indestructible, and yet Wolfram Cerberus had torn through this one with a single head butt. He slowly pulled himself upright in front of Haruyuki, and his visor, so like fangs meeting, opened with a creak that exposed his dark gray goggles.
Haruyuki couldn’t see the light of the eye lenses that should have been beneath them. However, he could feel the laserlike gaze, so directly focused on him that it was almost painful. A voice brimming with youthful passion flowed bright and clear, tinged with the peculiar echo of the stage.
“This is my second time in the Steel stage. It really is hard, though! My head is still spinning!”
At this cheerful line, Haruyuki finally managed to wake up from his d
aze. He checked that his opponent didn’t appear ready to attack him and then quickly got to his feet.
Seen from up close for the first time, Cerberus, while having an orthodox form and color, radiated a particular kind of presence. The reason for that was the pattern of thin striations running along the armor of his entire body. It was almost as if a hard-to-process material was machined to the point of exhaustion, so there was just nothing left to finish the surface—it was that kind of roughness. Despite the fact that he was also a metal color, Wolfram Cerberus was the polar opposite of the smooth-mirrored Crow.
“Maybe you could tell me: How did you know my position with such accuracy? You didn’t just guess at it, did you?” It was very much not a question a level five should be putting to a level one, but Haruyuki felt compelled to ask. Even if Wolfram Cerberus had seen through to Haruyuki’s plan to ambush him, there was no way he could have seen his position on the other side of the thick steel plate.
Cerberus stood up straight again and bowed his head, for some reason. “I do sincerely apologize for the surprise attack! It isn’t that I measured your position, Crow. It’s simply that this is the middle of the wall of the building. I like the middle.”
At this response, even the members of the Gallery, quiet thus far, stirred. Haruyuki also stared in mute amazement at the wall behind Cerberus. The large hole that he had plunged through did indeed seem to be precisely equidistant from the north and the south. After all, Haruyuki had readied himself in the middle so that he could respond whichever direction Cerberus came from. If he had been even a meter off to either side, then perhaps he wouldn’t have had the first attack taken from him.
Glancing up at his own health gauge, he saw that the one punch he had taken to his right shoulder had carved away nearly 10 percent. He really couldn’t underestimate the close-range attack power generated from the hardness of Cerberus’s armor.
But to put it another way, he just had to not get hit. “I get it. I have to apologize, too. I’m more experienced, and yet I was going for an ambush.” He returned the apology with his own apology and slowly raised his hands. He brought his left hand forward and pulled his right back. “I won’t run and hide. Let’s settle this with hand-to-hand combat, as two close-range types.”