“Yes! This is just what I want. Thank you very much!!”
In contrast with Haruyuki’s lowered stance, Cerberus faced forward and crossed his arms in front of his body before pulling both hands back with a high-pitched sound. Silver Crow was slightly taller, but Cerberus, with his straightly lined armor, was probably heavier.
Because Haruyuki had watched him one-sidedly defeat Frost Horn in the previous duel, his request for hand-to-hand combat definitely did not mean that he looked down on his opponent. But Haruyuki was confident that when it came to a contest of fists and feet, he was no slouch. Because his speed—which even the swordmaster Kuroyukihime had acknowledged—was Silver Crow’s greatest strength.
The tension between the two as they faced each other grew and grew until finally, it was so strained the air itself was almost electrified. The instant this fighting spirit made the steel panels at their feet creak, Haruyuki moved.
“Shi!” With a sharp battle cry, he dashed forward. In a single breath, he closed the distance between them, and his right hand shot out in a long punch.
Cerberus didn’t move to dodge the fist, but rather raised his left arm to block. So he really did place absolute faith in his defensive power. The armor with the rough notches on it did seem intensely hard, and if he forced his fist through it, he might actually end up taking damage instead.
But when his punch was on the verge of hitting his enemy’s arm, Haruyuki braked suddenly and instantaneously with his right wing. His body spun around, yanking his fist back. Using this vector, he went for a motionless low kick with his left leg. He was aiming for the place where Cerberus’s armor looked thinnest on his lower body, the side of his right knee.
If he had tried to pull off the combination of a feint with a right straight going into a low left with just his body, that intention would inevitably bleed into his movements, but it was impossible to read his movements when he controlled his posture with his wings. And yet Cerberus reacted spectacularly, lifting his right leg to block—but Haruyuki’s kick landed a moment before he could.
Metal collided with metal. The screech of collision. Countless scattering sparks cast dazzling illumination on the steel plates of the ground.
His upper body angled to one side, Cerberus shot off a counter of a right hook, but by that time, Haruyuki had already dashed back more than two meters. Of course, he had also used the thrust of his wings for a few tenths of a second to retreat.
Glancing up, he saw that this one blow had reduced Cerberus’s health gauge by about 5 percent. For a clean hit, that wasn’t very satisfying, but at any rate, if he aimed for gaps in the armor, he could do damage. As long as he was sure of that, then…
The only thing to do is rush him!!
“Urrrr…Aaaah!!” Roaring, Haruyuki charged once more.
The high kick, normally out of range, got a boost from the propulsive power of both wings. His curved trajectory abruptly turned straight, and the tip of his foot, stretched out into a silver lance, slipped past Cerberus’s crossed-arm block to explode into the thin armor at his throat. Robbed of just under 10 percent of his health gauge, Cerberus reeled backward.
Normally, Haruyuki also couldn’t move after completing a big kick until that leg hit the ground. But as he bent his extended right leg, he vibrated his left wing with everything he had. Using the propulsive force generated as a stepping stone, this time, it was a middle kick with his left leg. He drove his foot into Cerberus’s undefended right flank, and his opponent staggered and dropped to one knee. Haruyuki rotated diagonally in midair and brought the heel of his right foot down perpendicularly. This landed sharply on Cerberus’s neck, knocking the small avatar’s head to the ground.
Using the reaction force from the heel drop, Haruyuki flew backward through space and landed three or so meters away. Here, the members of the Gallery on the rooftops erupted once more.
“What was that movement?! I couldn’t read him at all!”
“You didn’t know? That’s Crow’s Aerial Combo.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen Cerberus go down.”
Without actively listening, these comments made their way to Haruyuki’s ears as he exhaled a long-held breath.
With the three clean hits of the succession of kicks, Cerberus’s health gauge had dropped to 70 percent. However, for damage done by a level five to a level one, it was comparatively small. Normally, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see that his opponent’s gauge had dropped into the yellow zone with hits like that.
It would be fairly tough to cut away the remaining 70 percent in this fashion—that said, he saw a chance at victory. He might be outmatched in defensive abilities and probably attack power, too, but he excelled at speed. As long as he kept his guard up and didn’t lose focus, he could push ahead with his Aerial Combo.
“But this is charging Cerberus’s special-attack gauge, too. The real contest starts now,” he heard someone in the Gallery say.
Haruyuki once again glanced up to the right. Indeed, with the bonus from object destruction when he ripped that hole open in the wall of Nakano Broadway and the series of blasts from Haruyuki, Wolfram Cerberus’s special-attack gauge was more than half charged. It couldn’t be that on top of the super hardness of tungsten, he also had a special attack? Haruyuki swallowed hard as Cerberus slowly pulled himself up from the steel ground where he lay.
“Wow…” He shook his wolflike head two or three times, and his usual bright voice rang out. “Just what I expected, Crow. I’d heard about you, but you’re much faster than I even imagined.”
“You’re a fair bit harder than I expected.”
At Haruyuki’s retort, the gray avatar bowed his head. “Thank you so much for the compliment. But…I’m sorry, it’s still not there.”
Unable to immediately grasp what he was saying, Haruyuki parroted the words back, “Still not there…? Not where?”
“I’ll show you now,” Wolfram Cerberus replied, not boastful in any way, and then he clenched his hands into fists before slamming them together in front of his chest.
Perhaps the movement was some kind of switch; the visor above and below his face bit into each other with a sharp metallic sound, hiding his goggles. That was the whole of the phenomenon—the open-and-close motion of the armor he had shown off several times up to that point. But his body didn’t transform; no weapon appeared.
“What exactly…?” The answer to Haruyuki’s murmured question was a sudden and fierce dash.
With Cerberus charging him head-on without the slightest feint or artifice, Haruyuki was slightly confused. But his mind quickly switched to battle mode. If Cerberus was going for a big finish, that was exactly what he wanted. He deployed the wings on his back with a gashk and started forward.
First, he’d stop Cerberus with a low kick, and then set up another combo. With that intention, he shot his right leg out sharply. The spot he was aiming for was the place he had gotten damage before: the side of the knee. Adding in the propulsive power of his wings, the lightning-fast kick dug into Cerberus’s left leg.
Up to this point, the situation was unfolding just like his first attack. But in the next instant, Haruyuki’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
The tip of his right foot should have gotten a perfect clean hit, and yet it was repelled like it had slammed into an absolutely impenetrable wall. And that wasn’t all. His silver armor was deeply dented, and a crimson damage effect like blood carved out an arc in the air. As proof that this wasn’t just appearance, Crow’s health gauge was cut away by nearly 10 percent.
“Wha…?” Groaning, Haruyuki lost his balance in midair, while in front of him, Cerberus’s tapered helmet closed in.
Desperately, he crossed his arms and took a defensive posture. Immediately after that came a tremendous shock. The pressure was like taking the charge of a Beast-class Enemy all by himself, and his arms were helplessly knocked back. The tip of the thick tungsten armor touched—no, buried—itself in Haruyuki’s exposed ches
t.
“Ngh…Gaah!!” he cried out, all the air in his lungs being pushed out, and flew backward.
In the blink of an eye, he was on the other side of the five-meter-wide street, his back slamming into a mid-size building. The impact was such that the tough exterior wall of the Steel stage was dented several centimeters, and his field of view went white for a moment.
With the damage from having a large hole opened up in his chest armor and the secondary damage of colliding with an object, Haruyuki’s health gauge, previously up around 90 percent, was abruptly colored yellow. This was a fearsome—actually, he wanted to say it was impossible—explosive attack power. And this decisive, full-power head butt should have caused some recoil for Cerberus as well, but he dug in to forcefully put a stop to it before charging again without a moment’s pause.
If I take this here, I can face him down!
Judging this instinctively, Haruyuki peeled his avatar off the dent on the steel plate and plunged forward. He focused all of his mental powers on the incredible force of the right straight punch that Cerberus was swinging at him. The power contained in that fist was apparent from the effect of the air scorching around it, but compared with the punch Great Wall’s Iron Pound had launched at him, it was slow; he could read its trajectory.
“Hngaah…!” His voice leaking out from between clenched teeth, Haruyuki let his left fist fly from down low. As he knocked away Cerberus’s punch from the inside with the armor of his arm, he’d hit his opponent’s head—basically, he was aiming for an irregular cross-counter.
The gray fist came flying at him, carving out more or less the arc he had expected. He aligned his left punch with the inside of that trajectory like a hook. The outside of Silver Crow’s forearm (the hardest part of his body) and the inside of Cerberus’s elbow (the part where there was only a thin overlay of metal panel) came into contact, and sparks flew.
Krrnk! A collision that rang through his bones. All the joints of his left arm creaked.
And what bounced back was once again Silver Crow. His full-body counterpunch was easily beaten back as though it had never even existed, and Cerberus’s fist slammed into the left side of his face. Once again, the impact was so great that not only his vision but his consciousness threatened to go flying. He worked hard to keep himself from flying off by utilizing the instantaneous thrust of his wings.
Why?! Haruyuki shrieked in the back of his mind, catching sight of his health gauge being cut away nearly 30 percent. Why would the kick or punch he launched with perfect timing be repelled this easily? His opponent’s armor might indeed have been the super-hard tungsten, but Silver Crow was a metal color with an armor hardness bonus. He had hit a brittle part; he just couldn’t process this result.
No, not yet. Don’t give up yet. Even if you lose in armor hardness, I still have speed…and the wings on my back! If this is how it’s going to be, then I’ll use up all of my special-attack gauge. It’s fully charged now from the successive serious damage. I can win this with a full-power dive attack from a super high altitude. Let’s see whether you can send even that bouncing back, Cerberus!!
“Urrr…aaaah!!” Haruyuki howled, mustering up the last of his will to fight.
He jumped into a back dash, whirling around and very narrowly avoiding the left hook his opponent threw his way after the right straight. He sank down, turning around to the rear, deployed the wings on his back, and flapped the metal fins with every bit of power he had. With his drawn-in right leg, he kicked hard off the ground and took off straight into the air like a rocket.
“—?!”
But in that instant, Haruyuki saw something that again went beyond all expectation. Cerberus had bent down slightly at exactly the same time as Haruyuki and kicked at the steel plate of the road with both feet, legs bent so much they creaked and squealed.
Whaaaam! The sound was an incredibly loud echo; the surface of the road rippled like a wave. The small avatar became a bullet shooting up vertically, twisting in midair, chasing after Haruyuki. He had no sooner flipped his body around with all his might than his helmet, visor still closed, hit the helmet of Silver Crow.
Haruyuki heard the sound of Silver Crow’s mirrored visor shattering and the sound of his own remaining health gauge being carved away to zero at the same time.
YOU LOSE!!
In his field of view robbed of saturation, the flaming letters popped up, burning relatively weakly compared with when he won. This was followed by the results screen being displayed—both of which Haruyuki stared at in a complete daze.
He had lost to an opponent four levels lower, so his reserve of Burst points dropped with alarming speed, but he wasn’t even aware of that. His duel avatar had already turned into polygons and scattered, so his consciousness alone hovered in a ghost state in the coordinates where he died, while he turned vacant eyes on the stage where the battle had ended.
A few meters away, Wolfram Cerberus, his visor closed once more, stood up straight facing Haruyuki (or in his general direction). He bent deeply at the waist and bowed before offering up a cheerful greeting without a hint of unpleasantness. “Thank you very much! I had a lot of fun!”
Haruyuki, the defeated, could leave the stage whenever he wanted once the results screen was shown, as long as he shouted the “burst out” command. But he didn’t even have the energy to utter those words; all he could do was stare at the young Burst Linker, his mind frozen.
Naturally, he had lost any number of duels. He had even been taken out by a lower-level opponent, had the whole fight flipped on its head when the enemy’s health gauge had less than 10 percent left once or twice. But those times hadn’t given him anywhere near the shock that this did.
There were two reasons that Haruyuki was hit so hard that he didn’t even have the energy to get depressed. First, there was Wolfram Cerberus’s overwhelming hardness. Of all the Burst Linkers Haruyuki had fought up to that point, the one with the greatest defensive abilities had been the Green King, aka Invulnerable, Green Grandé. Even though Haruyuki had at the time been fused with the Armor of Catastrophe, the Disaster, he had only been able to make the tiniest crack in the great shield the king carried, one of the Seven Arcs, the Strife.
However, Cerberus at level one normally couldn’t be compared with a level-nine king, but his hardness in a certain sense exceeded even that of Grandé—or rather, it was something different. In the first half of the duel, even with that hardness, Haruyuki had been able to do damage by aiming for the gaps in the armor. But in the second half, after Cerberus’s visor closed, his hardness was such that his entire body seemed impenetrable, including his so-called weak points. Haruyuki’s full-powered attacks had been in vain, repelled each time by Cerberus’s armor, and he couldn’t help feeling a despair that went beyond amazement.
And then there was the second, larger reason that knocked Haruyuki off his feet—his speed. In the final stages of the battle, he had abandoned the idea of hand-to-hand combat on the ground and wagered his hope of a reversal on a sudden drop kick after flying up to the limits of his altitude. Watching for an opening to take off, he tried to fly up in the shortest time, immediately after he had dodged his opponent’s big attack. That had been the plan.
But in that instant, despite the fact that Cerberus clearly kicked off the ground after Haruyuki, he’d gotten the jump on Crow after he’d taken off. The fact that his vertical ascent had been beaten down from in front of him was proof of that. In other words, although it was only in the last moment, Cerberus was also superior to Haruyuki in speed. He had lost in hardness as a metal color, and in speed, his greatest ability. On top of that, it was to a newbie opponent who had only become a Burst Linker a few days earlier.
Even after more than ten seconds had passed since the end of the duel, he still couldn’t believe the results screen before his eyes, and he continued to float, dumbfounded, in the place where he’d died. Through the light-purple, semi-transparent window, he could see the small gray avatar moving
away from him. He was heading over to where several members of the Gallery were standing, and it looked like they were saying something—probably an invitation to a Legion—but he couldn’t hear what.
As he watched Cerberus from behind conversing with the more-senior Burst Linkers without seeming the slightest bit shy, Haruyuki’s ability to think finally recovered—however slightly—and he let fragments of vague guesses run through his mind.
The fundamental rule of same level, same potential. Had this finally been broken? Had Wolfram Cerberus been given power practically impossible for a level one right from the start? It was hard to believe, but that was really the only thing he could think of. Or rather, that’s what he wanted to think. He had lost because his opponent was a deviation from the rules of the Accelerated World, an exception—a violation of the rules. He couldn’t think of another reason for his defeat.
“—Silver Crow.” Abruptly, a low voice called his name from behind, and Haruyuki jumped and shrank back into his invisible body. Ever so timidly turning around, he saw a female warrior avatar standing there, with blue armor that had a hint of green to it. It was Manganese Blade.
Her sharp eye lenses quietly gleaming, the senior member of the Leonids continued. “I’m under no obligation to show you any kindness, but…considering the Metatron attack, it would be an issue if you were to collapse for a few days. I’ll offer you a word in the guise of advice.” Even though she shouldn’t have been able to see the form of the loser, Manganese’s eyes caught Haruyuki’s directly. Like her voice, they cut into his mind like the tip of a sword.
“First, acknowledge Cerberus’s strength. Unless you start there, you’ll do nothing but struggle. It’s true, his power—his ability, Physical Immunity, is overwhelming. You probably want to think it’s against the rules. But that is what a lot of Burst Linkers thought eight months ago—when the unique Aviation ability was before their eyes.”