The Carbide Wolf

  Shouting in the back of his mind, Haruyuki roared and blocked Cerberus’s right leg, closing in on him, with the armor of his left arm. The instant metal touched metal, pale sparks shot out, and his forearm squealed sharply.

  If he simply guarded like this, the basic differences in hardness and weight, together with the effect of the Physical Immunity ability, would simply shatter Silver Crow’s armor and cause him massive damage.

  But as Haruyuki took the mid-kick with his left arm, he didn’t try to push it back, but rather attempted to diminish the force of it by synchronizing their rotational inertia. This required control of his entire body and his wings on par with trying to pass through the eye of a needle, but he summoned every ounce of concentration and made it through.

  This guard, which nearly cracked the armor of his arm, lasted for about half a second in reality, but to Haruyuki it felt like an eternity. His brain cells threatening to burn out, he made it through the tightrope walk and somehow managed to absorb just the amount of lethal force contained in that kick. And then he moved to the next stage.

  “Hah!” Expelling a sharp breath, he generated a new spiraling vector with the left arm that was still touching Cerberus’s right leg. The axis of the kick targeting Haruyuki’s torso slipped off to the outside from the interference. If he pushed like this, Haruyuki could probably ward off Cerberus’s kick without taking any damage.

  He hadn’t had the leeway to use this in the duel the day before. Or rather, he had forgotten, to be honest. This technique, Kuroyukihime’s teaching, the Way of the Flexible. The way Haruyuki had caught the falling rain in his palm and thrown it before was also an application of this. And today at lunch, through five consecutive duels, Kuroyukihime had beaten the technique into Haruyuki anew. In the back of his mind, her stern voice rang:

  “Haruyuki, your Way of the Flexible has basically passed the first level. But, of course, with every technique, there is always something more!

  “If you’re going to simply block an attack and ward it off with no damage, then dodging without making contact to begin with is far less risky. The essence of the Way of the Flexible is not defense. It can change that into an attack, and then for the first time, the technique comes alive!”

  Right, Kuroyukihime!

  Responding in his mind, he further focused his concentration. With a strange skreee sound, the sense of super acceleration came over him, and the world changed color slightly. For Haruyuki, even the pounding rain appeared frozen in midair.

  Haruyuki had secretly given his own Way of the Flexible the name “Guard Reversal.” But when he thought about it, this was too arrogant a name. What Haruyuki had been able to do thus far was simply interfere with the momentum of his opponent’s attack and ward it off; that clearly was not a reversal. If he couldn’t actually send it back to his opponent, he had no right to give it that name.

  At that moment, the axis of rotation had been taken from Wolfram Cerberus’s own body to the point of contact between his kick and Haruyuki’s arm, and his posture was crumpling as his kick flowed to the outside. Like this, he would simply be knocked back to the other side of the road, and without falling, he would stop himself and then instantly be readying his next attack. Just as Kuroyukihime said, this brought risk, and there was no point in having defended with the Way of the Flexible.

  “Ngah!” With a brief battle cry, Haruyuki took decisive action with absurd control, ascending with his right wing and descending with his left.

  Naturally, his entire body listed to the left. Or rather, not listed—he generated intense enough torque to almost knock him over sideways on the spot, and his avatar’s body squealed. He poured this energy, all of it, into Cerberus’s right leg where it intersected his left arm.

  “…!!”

  An aura of shock leaked out from beneath the wolf-shaped helmet with its closed visor. It was only natural that he be surprised at Silver Crow’s body suddenly rotating like a propeller, sucking his own feet in. But it didn’t end there.

  “Saah…yaaah!” Spinning to the left one time before standing again, Haruyuki yanked both arms up. The momentum of his spin was released—and with the force of his own kick combined with all of Haruyuki’s rotational power, Cerberus’s body was knocked flying spectacularly.

  He crashed into the road nearly ten meters away and bounced hard, scattering a mist of water. He continued to tumble along until he crashed into the guardrail on the side of the road and finally came to a stop.

  “Yaaaaaaah!!” The dozens of members of the Gallery cried out all at once in amazement. This surprise was not aimed at Haruyuki’s Guard Reversal. It was for the fact that Wolfram Cerberus’s health gauge had decreased nearly 20 percent.

  “Wh-why’d it go down?! He’s using Physical Immunity right now, right?!”

  “D-don’t ask me! Maybe it’s ’cos of the rain pooling on the road?”

  “Obviously! He might be a metal color, but, like, submersion damage!”

  The Gallery clamored, but then abruptly fell silent. Cerberus nimbly got to his feet and was readying himself for another attack.

  “We’re only just starting!” His voice was crisp and clear as usual, and he dashed forward, ripping through the wall of rain.

  About five meters ahead, Haruyuki sank gently down and jumped. He had repelled the first attack with a circular movement perhaps because he had determined that it was a curving middle kick, and now he was faced with a flying kick without any kind of rotation in the body. The speed at which he made the judgment and switched was nothing short of impressive. The jump kick was like a missile, with plenty of force. It looked like it could crash through two or three of the cracked buildings of the Storm stage.

  And yet…

  “Too soft!” Haruyuki shouted, and this time took Cerberus’s kicking leg with his right palm. He immediately vibrated his wings and rotated horizontally on the axis of his body. The intense spin that was generated swallowed up his enemy, knocking him once more onto the road on his back.

  Perhaps because he crashed at a more acute angle than the first time, Cerberus’s small body made a wham! and cracked the asphalt beneath him. A moment later, a powerful impact wave dispersed the water on the road and in the air into a semi-sphere. His health gauge dropped by about 20 percent again. The accumulated damage had already surpassed 50 percent, coloring Cerberus’s gauge yellow.

  “H-holy crap, he seriously pushed Cerberus into the yellow zone…”

  “Is Crow seriously gonna get revenge?!”

  “But…why is the damage hitting him?! I mean, the road surface’s totally a physical thing, right?!”

  “…I see.” The quiet but fully menacing voice of a girl cut through the shouts of the Gallery. “The difference between a strike and a throw, then?”

  When Haruyuki glanced at a building ahead, off to the right, even through the pouring rain he could see a female warrior avatar colored a deep blue. The horn on her helmet was a ponytail, which meant it was Manganese Blade. But today, standing beside her was the pigtailed warrior, Cobalt Blade.

  Just like you, Manganese, Haruyuki murmured in his head as he got some distance from Cerberus, still lying on the ground.

  Just as the member of the Gallery had noted, the road and the buildings were just hard objects, so they assumed that attacks using these would be physical and thus wouldn’t work on Cerberus in his current state of being physically invulnerable. And actually, making Cerberus crash into buildings or punching him with a mass of concrete made from smashing a building shouldn’t have done any damage to him. But with the road, the situation was a little different.

  First of all, in a Brain Burst duel stage, the ground, including roads, was fundamentally indestructible. Looking at it another way, this meant nothing other than the fact that the ground was in the same state of physical invulnerability as Cerberus.

  And secondly: In essentially all fighting games since the previous century, striking and throwing techniques were in different categories.
In the old 2-D fighting games Haruyuki collected, too, the majority of titles didn’t allow you to avoid throwing attacks even when you had super armor activated.

  Naturally, Haruyuki hadn’t been sure of it himself. But during his special training with Kuroyukihime, he had realized the possibility that even if striking attacks were ineffective, he could do damage by throwing Cerberus onto the road surface, and had asked for new training in the Way of the Flexible. In the space of a day, he could not in any way reach the level of Kuroyukihime, freely reversing the attack momentum of her opponent with a single arm, but if he combined the guarding technique he had practiced with his Aerial Combo that used his wings, he thought he might somehow manage to take in his opponent’s attack and return it—in other words, learn a real Guard Reversal.

  To polish the technique to this extent, Haruyuki had had his armor endlessly sliced open by the swords of the Black King. After taking on the challenge of those fearsome swords—also known as World’s End—even Cerberus’s super-hard punches and kicks felt somehow round and soft.

  The key to the Way of the Flexible was not to firmly repel anything, but rather accept it, become one with it. It absolutely couldn’t succeed if your heart was simply frozen with hostility.

  The me of yesterday probably couldn’t have succeeded, even if I had remembered the Way of the Flexible. Thinking this, Haruyuki soundlessly watched Cerberus as he finally pulled himself to his feet. With the rainwater flowing along the notches of the design, the tungsten armor looked less hard than it did beautiful, somehow. The sharply tapered helmet and the protruding edges of the shoulders seemed like nothing but terrible weapons the previous day, but now Haruyuki felt they revealed something of his interior.

  …What if.

  What if that other failure the day before yesterday…happened because I was only thinking about firmly repelling? What if it was the same as this at the root? Accept it, become one with it. That’s not just the key to the Way of the Flexible…something bigger… This thought flitted through the back of Haruyuki’s mind.

  “This…this is still the beginning!!” He was interrupted by the low cry of Cerberus, now on his feet.

  At some point, he had thrown off the polite speech, and the young wolf bent over three times. Chak! He stepped firmly forward, almost carving out the asphalt, and came charging at Haruyuki from dead on, with no tricks or feints.

  He was probably betting on settling this with his strongest weapon, the head butt that had broken Crow’s helmet the previous day. It was indeed a terrifying power. If Haruyuki took a direct hit from that, the difference in their gauges would at once be reversed. But.

  “When your opponent fires off his big technique, do not flinch! Stand and face it! Because that is precisely the moment when your opponent is afraid!!”

  Right!!

  “Aaaaah!!” Haruyuki roared and prepared to meet the charging Cerberus. That said, he wasn’t going to fight head butt with head butt, of course. Just as they were on the verge of contact, he created negative pressure with his wings, sank down to the point where he was touching the ground, and dived under Cerberus. With his right hand, he held his opponent’s neck and quickly rotated vertically to the rear.

  Kawhump!

  The largest impact so far shook the stage. The raindrops over a wide area turned into mist, momentarily turning his field of view white. When this faded, Haruyuki and the spectators saw the figure of Wolfram Cerberus, his head and shoulders half-buried in ground that was supposed to be impenetrable. Haruyuki had basically flung his opponent straight down in an overhead throw, and all the energy from the head butt was absorbed by the road.

  Cerberus’s health gauge was dyed red, a mere 10 percent remaining. The four gray limbs stretching out into air fell to the road surface. Haruyuki also flipped over and stood on his knees.

  A low voice flowed out into the pounding rain. “…I give…You really did get your revenge. But…I’m happy. There must be many people in this world who are strong like you…”

  Haruyuki didn’t immediately reply. He stared hard at the face mask of the fallen Cerberus from very close.

  The top and bottom of the visor were still biting into each other, but when he saw them from close up, they weren’t actually glued together, but rather, there was a gap of about a centimeter. When he really thought about it, if there wasn’t a gap, Cerberus wouldn’t have been able to see, but in that gap was only black darkness; he couldn’t find the light of eye lenses.

  “But I won’t let this loss stand. I’m going to work hard and get strong, and next time, I’ll crack your technique.” Even in this situation, there wasn’t a trace of poison in Cerberus’s words. They were sunny, clear, and full of the straightforwardness of a boy.

  But—

  But was that what a duel was?

  Cerberus’s technique, in which he had had absolute faith, was crushed, and then he’d been one-sidedly defeated in front of the large Gallery. The difference in their remaining gauges was even bigger than it had been the day before. Because the only damage Haruyuki had taken was the few dots when the side of his helmet had been lightly grazed at the beginning.

  And yet the fact that he was able to cheerfully acknowledge his defeat here was more than straightforwardness, somehow…

  “…Is that how you really feel?” Unthinking, Haruyuki tossed out the question.

  At the same time, the rain grew even more intense, and the raindrops pressing in on them at a diagonal mercilessly pounded both of the metal colors. With this, their conversation wouldn’t reach the Gallery.

  But Cerberus didn’t say yes or no, his body half-sunken into the pool on the road. He simply continued to be pounded by the relentless rain silently, almost as though he had turned into a simple metal statue.

  Abruptly…

  Before Haruyuki’s eyes, Cerberus’s helmet made a quiet creaking noise. The visor, with the centimeter-sized gap, now bit together completely. All that remained then was a zigzagging line thinner than a thread; he wouldn’t be able to see outside like that.

  Suspecting that this was some kind of intentional act, Haruyuki furrowed his brow. Immediately after that, something even more incomprehensible happened.

  A clinking metallic noise also came from the armor covering Cerberus’s left shoulder. When he looked there, the fine zigzagging line that he had assumed was just a pattern up to that point expanded about a centimeter.

  It was like, almost…his face and his shoulder had switched places.

  This was the impression he had when, in the next moment, the gap that was created on the shoulder armor shone with a sharp red light.

  Staring at this in amazement, Haruyuki watched as the shoulder zigzag spoke.

  “…So it’s finally my turn…”

  To be continued

  AFTERWORD

  Reki Kawahara here. I’m bringing you Accel World 11: The Carbide Wolf.

  To be honest, when combined with my other series, this book is my twentieth. And the number twenty was my original target.

  Ever since I made my debut in February 2009, I’ve been privileged to have a book come out every other month, so to get to this place, it’s taken three years and two months. When I look back on it, it feels like a long time, but also like the blink of an eye. And fortunately, I was able to reach the number of books I was aiming for without any real trouble or serious writer’s block…But as to why I set twenty as my target, it was because I thought that if I wrote that many, the end for Accel World (and my other series) would come into view. (LOL)

  However, the result is as you can see: far from ending, I don’t even really know at present how far the story’s actually gotten. I think Haruyuki’s grown a fair bit as a protagonist, but Kuroyukihime and their friends have basically not developed at all; the Legion still has a mere six members; and their territory hasn’t expanded from Suginami area—none of which I expected at all by this point. And of course, in this book, I actually intended to move the story forward toward the c
onclusion, but I wrote and wrote, and it never seemed to be getting there, so eventually, I was faced with the predicament of ending it with “to be continued!” I’m sure all of you readers are rolling your eyes, but if I might be allowed to make the slightest excuse, when a story goes on to this extent, control is impossible, or rather, it’s like the story just yanks the author along in the direction it itself wishes to go. Though, of course, that is simply my own personal case.

  However, the flip side of this is that being allowed to add onto the number of volumes is, for the writer and the story, an extremely fortuitous thing, so rather than relaxing simply because I reached the target number of volumes, I would like to continue to bring you the story for as long as I’m able to write it.

  To conclude: The fact that I was able to reach this number twenty is naturally and obviously because all of you have given me your support. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you once more. And I would ask that you all join me in setting your sights on the next twenty volumes.

  This is a bit of a change of subject, but thank you all so much for the many, many entries we received for the first Accel World Duel Avatar Contest, which was held in November 2011. I let out a cry of delight at the many marvelous avatars, more than 450 of them, but after careful consideration, I am announcing the three that will be used as avatars in the novels.

  First is Uraomote Yamaneko’s Peach Parasol. The unified feel of the design as a duel avatar, along with the idea of the parasol Enhanced Armament (named Hopping Shoot) really hit me. I had the wild idea she was maybe a member of the Red Legion!

  Next is Nagomi Kiya’s Chocolat Puppeteer. At any rate, I was knocked out by the delicious-looking armor texture. (LOL) I’ll have to think a little about her Legion, but on the occasion when she does appear, I want her to be licked—I mean, play a really active role!

  And then, finally, Alt’s Tungsten Wolfram. If, hypothetically, I were going to give a prize, it would perhaps be the Miracle Prize. And as to what exactly is the miracle, it’s the fact that the avatar Wolfram Cerberus that appears in Volume 11—which I had already written a fair bit of at the time the contest was opened—and this idea have a lot of points in common! I was honestly surprised by this myself. (LOL) The design and the abilities are actually a little bit different, but from Volume 12 on, I’d like to adopt some of Alt’s ideas and make Haruyuki’s new rival Cerberus even cooler.