The Carbide Wolf

  Takumu likely felt the same doubt. He stared at the Legion Master hard, together with Haruyuki and Chiyuri.

  Faced with their combined gazes, Kuroyukihime uncharacteristically lowered her head as if to avoid them and glanced to her right, at the shrine maiden avatar standing a way off.

  Also unusually, Ardor Maiden curled her normally ramrod-straight back and hid her face beneath her bangs. And now that he was thinking about it, Haruyuki realized belatedly that Shinomiya hadn’t been talking very much that day, although he didn’t know the reason for that.

  “Let’s save that matter for next time.” Fuko nodded gently at the confused threesome. “It’s just as Pile says. Rather than continuing this harsh training any further, I also think we should try to approach it from the theoretical side. Red King, Leopard—I’d like to end things here today. What do you think?”

  The two members of the Red Legion exchanged a look and then nodded together.

  “I got no probs with that.”

  “NP for me, either.”

  “Well then, shall we all move to the leave point in Koenji Station? There was a slightly largish Wild-class Enemy along the way, so how about we hunt that and replenish the Burst points Corvus lost?”

  5

  Pushing back against the gravity of the real world, Haruyuki raised his eyelids. The Arita living room didn’t appear to have changed a bit from before the dive. Which was only natural. The approximately twelve hours they had spent inside was only the passage of forty or so seconds on this side.

  However, Haruyuki couldn’t stand up right away because of the feeling of exhaustion pressing heavily on his shoulders. This was perhaps the first time since he’d become a Burst Linker that he had died that many times in a row. Because the laser emitted by the Red King’s armaments was almost too powerful, evaporating Silver Crow in a matter of seconds, the pain and the shock actually hadn’t been that bad, but he couldn’t help but be embarrassed at the fact that there had been absolutely no difference between the first time and the tenth time in how long the evaporation took.

  When he stayed buried in the sofa, head hanging dejectedly, Kuroyukihime, having plucked the XSB cable from her Neurolinker, turned a kind smile on him from the opposite sofa. “Nice work, Haruyuki. You really tried your best out there. Sorry you had to have that terrible experience.”

  “Huh? No, I mean. It’s just…I didn’t learn the Theoretical Mirror ability, after all…,” he mumbled in reply.

  Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Niko, and Pard all exchanged a brief glance, and then Niko opened her mouth on behalf of all.

  “Now, look, Crow. To be blunt, we all thought the possibility of you suddenly awakening the ability in today’s training was fairly low.”

  “…Huh?”

  “The job Lotus asked me to do wasn’t to help you get Theoretical Mirror—it was to make you feel with your body what a light attack was. Because you’re so good at seeing what comes next and dodging in duels and the Territories and stuff, you only take hits from homing missiles or super-barrage machine guns.”

  “Uh, yeah, well…” It was true that Haruyuki had recently become able to dodge pretty much all single-shot, direct, long-distance attacks—in other words, laser and rifle types—while flying. His rivals also knew this and had thus begun to ready anti–Silver Crow firepower, like Niko said, so his chances of being hit by a laser decreased even further.

  “Whaaat? So that was the goal right from the start, huh? So then, Haru, how was it? You see some kind of secret to light techniques?” Chiyuri asked, leaning forward.

  Haruyuki shrugged, grinning wryly. “I mean, it’s a secret, you know. It was totally different from even the other big red techniques, like the ones where they shoot shells or release flames and stuff, but…”

  “Hmm. How was it different?” This time, the question came from Takumu, looking very interested.

  “Hmm, right, okay. There was no explosive impact, and there was no smell of fuel burning. At best, it’s this flow of pure energy coming at an incredible density. My armor reflected the flow for just the first instant, but it quickly burned red and then melted and evaporated…I guess that’s what it felt like.”

  “I see…In the real world, at least, I’m pretty sure that of all the metals, silver has the greatest reflectivity. Um, what percent was it exactly?” Takumu quickly moved to flick at his virtual desktop.

  But before he could, Pard said, “Average of ninety-five percent of visible light.”

  “…Why d’you know that?” her Legion Master asked.

  The senior executive in her sailor-style uniform answered seriously, “I thought this might play out like this, so I looked it up. I don’t like waiting for net searches.”

  “…I see.”

  How very like this impatient alien, they all thought.

  Takumu cleared his throat before continuing. “S-so in other words, this metallic mirror reflects basically all wavelengths of light. Put another way, that’s why it’s the color silver. Metals look metallic because they have a low reflectance in the blue light region. But the reflectance of silver’s not one hundred percent. The light it can’t completely reflect, a mere few percent, heats Silver Crow’s armor and evaporates him.”

  “Ooh, I get it. So, basically, Crow’s not shiny enough, right?” Chiyuri noted, and Takumu stopped for a moment before nodding. And then, of course, came: “So let’s polish him. If that’s it, then we just have to polish him! Like with cleansers or something, until Silver Crow’s all shiny!”

  After imagining the scene of everyone joining up to roughly polish his avatar, Haruyuki hurriedly shook his head from side to side. “N-no way! That will totally hurt like crazy! And it’s not like there’s cleanser or anything in the Accelerated World…”

  “Well, it’s not that there isn’t any.” Kuroyukihime nodded with a straight face, freezing Haruyuki, but fortunately, she followed up with supplementary words negating this comment. “But no matter how much we polish him, his reflectance likely won’t reach a hundred percent. Even supposing we could get it up to ninety-nine percent, he still wouldn’t be able to withstand Rain’s armaments. The force of that remaining one percent would melt his avatar.”

  “…In other words, that’s also how amazing Niko’s light attack is.” Chiyuri sighed, apparently giving up on the polishing idea.

  The Red King twitched her nose proudly. “Well, it’s so-so, y’know. But Crow’s the first one who’s ever been able to withstand a direct blast of my guns at that level for almost five seconds. You should be more confident.”

  “True. Showered in that for a mere one second, the armor all over my body was burnt.” Kuroyukihime was referring to the time they went to subjugate the fifth Armor of Catastrophe together and Niko had lost her temper, shooting Lotus together with Disaster with her laser canon.

  “Tch! What’s done is done. And anyway, you’re black to start with, so it’s no big diff if you get a little burnt,” Niko snarled.

  Kuroyukihime was quick to retort. “So then, given that you’re red already, you have no issue with being boiled in tomato sauce, hmm? We’ll have spaghetti arrabbiata at the next dinner party.”

  “H-hey, look, this isn’t about the real world! I’m basically no good with spicy pasta! If we’re gonna do tomato, then a regular spaghetti sauce is good enough!”

  “I’ll just say this now. I’m not good with squid ink spaghetti.”

  “No one said anything about squid ink!!”

  If he didn’t step up and say something, the two kings were likely to work themselves up to a direct duel, so Haruyuki hurriedly stuck his body between them. “W-well, if you’re both okay with tomato sauce pasta, I’d recommend Chiyu’s mom’s special pescatora. It’s full of seafood; it’s seriously the best!”

  “…Oh.”

  “…Huh.”

  Perhaps imagining the taste, they both fell silent, and he was able to bring the conversation back on track.

  “Um, so then, Taku, my—Silver Cro
w’s—armor has a high level of reflectance, but it’s not perfect, which is why it can’t invalidate a super-powerful light attack?”

  “Mm-hmm. That’s what I think.” The brains of the Legion went on to suggest, as his frameless glasses caught the light, “So then what could bring the reflectance rate of a metal up to the impossible one hundred percent is the Theoretical Mirror ability in question, I’m sure of it. I said this on the other side, too, but adversity and action alone are probably not enough to get it. An image arrived at through knowledge is also an essential trigger. Put simply, you need to know more deeply what a mirror is. That’s about all I can guess right now.”

  “Know a mirror, huh?” Haruyuki murmured, as if digesting the idea, and then looked again at his good friend’s face. “Thanks, Taku. I feel like I can kinda see the way now.”

  “You do? We’re counting on you, Haru. We need your power to cut the roots of those ISS kits taking over the Accelerated World.”

  “Yeah. When I was swallowed up by the armor, lots of people helped me out, so now it’s my turn to fight.”

  He and Takumu nodded sharply at each other.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sorry to butt in on this little love fest, but it’s about time to call it a night,” Chiyuri interjected, clapping her hands together.

  “It wasn’t a love fest!” Haruyuki hurried to protest, and when he spotted a hint of glee in the sulky face of his other childhood friend, he felt even more awkward. He began tidying up the cables on the table to hide his embarrassment, and for some reason, Kuroyukihime and Fuko and the others laughed out loud in bright voices.

  The shared mission between the two Legions was adjourned there for the time being. And there was a reason he hadn’t brought up the subject of Argon Array aka Quad Eyes Analyst at the gathering that day.

  Naturally, Haruyuki had reported to Kuroyukihime and Fuko that Argon Array was a core member of the Acceleration Research Society as soon as the meeting the previous day had ended. They had both heard his story with the utmost seriousness and said they would begin an immediate investigation, but at the same time, they decided that the information should stay within Nega Nebulus; they could not tell the two members of Prominence yet. The reason for this was that if Niko or Pard was to act independently, the malice of the Acceleration Research Society might be turned against the Red Legion—in fact, the possibility of that was extremely high.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t have faith in Prominence’s investigative abilities or fighting power. But unlike Nega Nebulus, it was a large Legion, with a general force of more than thirty people. It wasn’t possible to always be up-to-date on the status of all its members, and worming their way in from the edges of a Legion was the Acceleration Research Society’s specialty.

  Thus, Haruyuki turned toward Niko and Pard as they got ready to head home and stood to see them off, while apologizing to them in his heart. He tried to see them to the outside door, but at the entrance to the living room, Pard said, “Here’s good,” and stopped him. Guessing that it would take her a while to put on her riding boots at the doorway, he bowed his head without protest.

  “’Kay, see ya! Thanks for the curry! Make sure to call us when you’re doing the pescatora!” Niko called before shutting the door to the living room, and the sound of two sets of footsteps receded down the hallway. A minute and a half later, the door lock/unlock dialogue popped up in his field of view. Another few minutes after that, Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Utai, all going home together in the same car, stood up and slipped out the front door—Haruyuki saw them off there this time—and then finally, Chiyuri and Takumu went home to the different floors of the same condo complex.

  The second he was alone, a profound sadness washed over him, and he let out a thin sigh. Despite the fact that this was his own familiar home, the white wallpaper and hard resin flooring had quickly taken on the face of a distant stranger. Takumu and the others had helped clean up, so there was not a trace of the commotion of only a half an hour earlier.

  When he glanced at the analog clock on the wall, it had just hit eight fifteen PM. On his virtual desktop, Haruyuki turned off the air conditioning and lights in the living room, gently closed the glass door, and returned to his own room at the end of the hallway. The wall to his left in his thirteen-square-meter Western-style room was taken up by a sliding bookshelf, while the right side was occupied by a semi-double bed. Neither furnishing seemed very suitable for a boy in junior high school, but he was simply using the things his father had left behind long ago when his parents got divorced.

  As he increased the illumination of the LED ceiling lights slightly, set to a warm color, he moved to his writing desk, which faced the southern window, and then sat down in the mesh office chair that had also been his father’s. Although the desktop had been far away when he first started using it, even when the chair was raised to the highest setting, now it fit him perfectly, as if it had been made to order.

  He set his arms down on the desk and launched the reminder app, another original from Kuroyukihime. He had one piece of homework for the next day, but he had taken care of it with the help of Takumu and the others over the course of the evening, so it was marked completed. Other than that, he had one task related to the Umesato Junior High School festival, which was coming up the following Sunday. The deadline for applications to bring guests, including parents and guardians, was in two days, but there was no way his mother would come, and he had no friends outside of school he wanted to—

  His thoughts had gotten that far when several faces flitted across the back of his mind: The two members of the Red Legion he had seen just half an hour earlier. And Haru’s old rival in the Green Legion. Strictly speaking, Fuko Kurosaki and Utai Shinomiya weren’t Umesato students, either, but he was sure Kuroyukihime would invite them.

  But could he really invite Burst Linkers from Prominence and Great Wall to a school festival that had absolutely nothing to do with Brain Burst? The relationship Haruyuki had with those girls was at best through the intermediary of the Accelerated World. He had met them several times in the real, including that day, but every time, the sole matter of business had been something related to Brain Burst.

  After thinking about it for a while, he decided to table the matter until the following day and wiped away his virtual desktop with his hand. All the windows disappeared, and the icons quickly retreated to the edge of his field of view. He leaned back in the office chair, reclining leisurely, and his thoughts turned toward one more piece of homework.

  “…A mirror, huh…?” he murmured to himself.

  Wait, do I have one? he wondered, pulling open his desk drawer. It was filled with a jumble of things—memory cards of unknown content, cables of mysterious origin—but it didn’t seem like there was a hand mirror in there anywhere. And he didn’t have a wall or full-length mirror in his room. He found a chrome card case and pulled that out instead. After he polished it with the hem of his T-shirt, he looked closely at the glittering silver—

  “Whoa, whoa, at least have a hand mirror or something. Geez.”

  He heard a voice from behind. Half unconsciously, he retorted, “N-not too many junior high school boys have something like that, you know.”

  “Huh? From what I’ve seen, Pile’s got one, though.”

  “No matter how you look at it, Taku’s one of the few—” After conversing normally up to that point, he finally realized it: This was not a voice call via Neurolinker. It was a conversation using real mouths and ears. Which meant, in other words, the distance from which this real voice was reaching him…

  “—?!” Haruyuki and the chair whirled around at an incredible speed, the force of which spun him all the way around once before he could get a look in the six o’clock direction.

  A light-gray blanket covered the substantial, semi-double bed. Poking out from beneath that, torso leaning up against the extra-large pillow, face plastered with a grin and red pigtails swinging, was definitely the leader of Prominence, who had supposedl
y gone back to the Nerima area on a large electric bike earlier. It was Scarlet Rain, Yuniko Kozuki.

  “Wh-wh-wha-ah-ah?!” Why are you here?! Haruyuki stammered the line like a broken audio file playing, flapping his mouth open and shut.

  Even if, hypothetically, she had once again gotten a hold of an instant key to the Arita house through some means or another, a warning would have been displayed in Haruyuki’s vision the moment the entryway door was opened. But he hadn’t seen anything like that since everyone went home. So then how had she opened the locked door…?

  “…Oh…! N-n-no way! Did you not leave right from the start?! You closed the door when you left the living room, and then only Pard went toward the entryway, while you snuck into my room and hid under the blanket. That’s it, isn’t it!” Famed detective Haruyuki called out with all his might upon discovering the trick to the locked room.

  “No other way, is there?” Niko readily assented. “But I mean, you shoulda noticed when you came in the room. This blanket’s so thin, it was totes obvious I was under it.”

  “Unh! …I-it’s just, I didn’t actually think anyone was here or anything…”

  “You’re the sort that gets killed in the first ten minutes of a horror movie.”

  “Y-you’re one to— Hey, that’s not the point!” Panting as he collected his thoughts, he finally happened upon what he should say next. “Wh-why?! Obviously, Pard was helping you, right? S-s-s-so why would you do this?!”

  “Like I said, I fed them this story about staying out for the night, so I can’t go back to the dorm today. And it’s all because of you asking me for help, so only natural you take responsibility,” she told him, the look on her face saying it was the most obvious thing in the world, and he actually started to feel like it was only natural. He nodded unconsciously before shaking his head frantically once more.

  “B-b-b-b-but my mom’s coming home today! What am I supposed to tell her?!”