“Although it would be fun to have you introduce us, we can do that next time. She won’t find out as long as I stay in your room. Oh! But let me use the bath first. And I need a change of clothes.”
“Find out…Bath…Clothes…” Almost belatedly, the cooling mechanism for the circuit of his thoughts could no longer keep up, and he simply parroted her words back to her, while Niko peeled the blanket away and sprang out of the bed to the floor. She opened the closet on the north side on the room and rummaged through the ten or so T-shirts on hangers there.
“You got terrible taste. No red? Red…Oh! This’ll work.” With a clattering sound, she pulled out a large, bright-red shirt with the logo of an Italian motorcycle manufacturer on it and headed for the door.
“’Kay, gimme about twenty minutes. If your momma comes home before then, you just take care of it.”
Kachak! She opened the door, and then Haruyuki was left alone in his room.
That was an illusion for sure—no, wait, the real issue is, how am I supposed to ‘take care of it’? I’ll just have to use the Cousin Tomoko Saito strategy again—his mind raced until, finally, there was flashing in the edge of his field of view to indicate that the bath was in use.
If, hypothetically, he pressed that small icon and then activated emergency mode from the home server operation window that opened, it would be possible to call up a bath monitor window, but of course, he would never think of—well, he would just think of it and then reject the idea. Haruyuki let out a sigh so long it lasted at least ten seconds.
Fortunately, he supposed, even though Niko’s bath stretched out five minutes longer than she said it would, the catastrophe of his mother returning home during that time was evaded.
“Foowheee, that bath of yours really is huuuge!” the Red King commented as she returned to his room.
Haruyuki went to toss her the bottle of mineral water he had just taken out of the refrigerator, averting his eyes. His aim was off, and Niko caught it just as it was on the verge of crashing into the bookshelf.
“Watch out! You gotta look where you’re throwing stuff!”
“A-as if I could look! You gotta actually get dressed before you come in here!” he shrieked back.
“I am dressed.” Niko looked down at herself and spread her hands out as if to say “What are you talking about?” And she was indeed wearing clothes, but just the single T-shirt she had commandeered from his closet, her thin, pale bare legs stretching out from beneath the hem. Although the T-shirt was large enough to cover her to the knees, since she was carrying in her right hand the T-shirt and cut-off jeans she had been wearing, he was forced to know what was under the shirt.
“Th-that’s not enough, is it! I mean!” Haruyuki shot back, covering 70 percent or so of his field of view.
Niko chuckled as she pulled the hem of the shirt up three centimeters. “You say that, but it’s just you getting all hot and bothered by your leg fetish, right? Right?”
“N-no—! I-I’m not into that!”
“So what are you into?”
“W-well, that’s—” He froze, and a screen in the back of his mind came on. The image shown there was for some reason the sword legs of Black Lotus, Sky Raker’s legs in their high heels, Blood Leopard’s animal-shaped legs, and he waved his hands—What is this, anyway?!—and wiped the images away.
Seeing Haruyuki like this, Niko smiled for some reason in full-fledged angel mode and sang, “Brother’s acting stra~ange! ” This was followed by “Thanks for the water!” as she twisted the cap off the plastic bottle and drank deeply.
Without realizing its intensity, Haruyuki felt his heart pound hard at the sight of the girl with her hair casually down, the ends still damp, as he repeated to himself like an incantation, That is the Red King, that is the Red King.
After emptying half the bottle in one go, Niko exhaled heavily, set the bottle down on the sideboard, together with her clothes, and then flopped backward onto the bed. On top of the adult-size bed, she looked extra small, making Haruyuki’s heart skip a beat in a different way than it had before.
Arms and legs splayed, Niko closed her eyes for more than a minute. Just when Haruyuki was starting to worry that she had already fallen asleep—in which case, where would he sleep—she abruptly spoke in a quiet voice. “…If you don’t want to, you can step down, y’know.”
“…Huh? Wh-what?”
“From the vanguard in the Metatron strategy. To be honest, I’m annoyed at the kings. They were all shouting about putting a bounty on your head up to today, and now, as soon as there’s no basis for that, they’re all, ‘go get the Theoretical Mirror ability.’ Too convenient, no matter how you look at it. Those guys, ’specially Purple and Yellow, they don’t care at all if you end up in unlimited EK fighting Metatron, y’know…”
Her tone was restrained, but he could sense the deep indignation in it—and a note of apprehension. He wasn’t able to reply immediately.
Abruptly, a faint voice came back to life in his ears. Right, after the meeting of the Seven Kings the week before, too, Niko had suddenly shown up at his house. And when she was leaving, she’d said to him, Look, Big Brother Haruyuki. If one of us—or maybe both of us—lose Brain Burst, we’ll probably forget everything, everything about each other, you know. So promise. That when we find a name we don’t know in the address book of our Neurolinkers, before we erase the data, we’ll send one mail. And then maybe, one more time…
“…Niko.” Haruyuki finally opened his mouth, and the girl on the bed lifted her eyelids slightly. As he stared at her eyes, shining a deep green, he added, “Um…Th-thanks. But it’s okay. I’ve seen Metatron’s laser with my own eyes. It’s too powerful for me to get close enough to end up in unlimited EK. And Iron Pound asking me to be in the vanguard…I feel that pressure, but I’m also a little happy, actually. So I mean, I mean…”
While he fumbled and searched earnestly for the right words, he noticed that Niko had at some point turned her gaze directly on him. On her youthful face, innocence and a deep discretion coexisted, making him aware all over again of the fact that she was also a king.
“…I mean, they say I’m the only completely flying type in the Accelerated World, so basically, I’m a foreign body. Regardless of the fact that I’m a member of Nega Nebulus, for a lot of Burst Linkers, I’m just this irregular someone they have to figure out how to attack. In a way, I’m sort of like an Enemy. But I think Pound spoke to me yesterday as an equal Burst Linker. I was pretty surprised, ’cos, like…it was amazing. That’s why…That’s why I…” He had somehow stammered and faltered this far in explaining himself, but he couldn’t find the words that came next.
Here’s what I thought. I thought maybe, if I actually carried out my role as the vanguard in this mission against Metatron, then just maybe, that might be an opportunity for the five kings and Kuroyukihime—who’ve been so antagonistic for so long—to take a step toward each other. The way you and Kuroyukihime became friends.
“Right.” As if she had completely seen through into Haruyuki’s heart full of these thoughts, Niko smiled gently, clearly, and a tiny bit sadly. “Well, if you’ve thought it through, then I won’t try to stop you. But, like…just be careful. Metatron’s not your only enemy.”
“Huh? What does that mean…?”
“You remember what I said last week?”
Haruyuki blinked rapidly a few times at the sudden unexpected question, before replying in an unintelligible voice, “Uh, um. Yeah. Like…if I found a name I didn’t know in my Neurolinker address book—”
Suddenly, Niko’s face became as red as the T-shirt she was wearing, and the large pillow whizzed as it flew through the air at him. Taking it squarely in the face, Haruyuki heard a high-pitched shriek.
“N-n-not that! W-well, you do have to remember that, too, but—not that, the part before that!”
“B-before?” Cradling the pillow in his arms after it fell from his face, Haruyuki searched his memory once again. A
single strange word came back to life in his mind. “Oh, uh, that? Um, that the Ori—Originators are monsters or something?”
“Right, that.” Niko already had her serious face back on, and Haruyuki gulped, still clutching the pillow. “At the meeting last week, pathetically, I freaked. But today, I carefully measured the information pressure of all the kings. It’s not like I have special abs like the Analyst or anything, but like any good red type, I got a bit of a scanning function in these eyes, okay?”
Haruyuki very nearly reacted to “Analyst,” but managed to control himself somehow, and asked about something different. “S-scan…? Like…you can see through things?”
“Idiot. Like a thermal scan or wind direction scan. If I really put some muscle into it, I can see the amount of memory info a Burst Linker’s built up, too. It’s like…how a ton of gravity’ll distort space. And at that meeting, radiating an information pressure that was an order of magnitude different from the others was first of all…the Green King, Green Grandé.” Niko raised one finger as she announced the name.
To a certain degree, Haruyuki had expected it. That evening four days earlier, while he was fused with the Armor of Catastrophe, Haruyuki had crossed swords with Green Grandé. In that instant, part of the vast amount of time the king had spent in the Accelerated World poured into Haruyuki, albeit just the smallest amount. “Yeah. I kinda got the sense too that the Green King was a little different from the other kings.”
“He doesn’t talk, much less duel.” A faintly wry smile crossed Niko’s face, and she quickly resumed her serious look before raising another finger. “And the second person was…the Blue King, Blue Knight.”
“Huh? Him? I kinda thought he was maybe the easiest of all the kings to get along with.”
“Because his tone and attitude are fairly informal. But, like…kinda so-so on whether that’s his true self, y’know? You hear stuff about him.” After showing the slightest hesitation, Niko lowered her voice and continued. “When Lotus took the head of the previous Red King, it was the Blue King who went craziest. Apparently, he rampaged like he was a totally different person, cutting through not just the buildings and stuff in the stage, but the earth itself.”
“Th-the earth is fundamentally indestructible.”
“That’s why, like, it’s a rumor at best. But it’s not sure if that lighthearted chairman from yesterday’s meeting is the real knight. He’s probably like the Green King, a Burst Linker with no parent—in other words, an Originator.”
“Origin…ator?” Haruyuki quietly repeated the word he had heard not only from Niko, but also from the mouth of the Green King himself. The parent-child relationship was the first bond a Burst Linker had. The parent told the child everything they knew, and the child worked to live up to the parent’s expectations. It was precisely because of this bond that Burst Linkers were able to love the Accelerated World—that was Haruyuki’s understanding. Because if you had no parent, then right from the start, every Burst Linker other than yourself was an enemy.
“My parent’s gone now, but even still, even now, I’m glad I’m Cherry’s child. Because all the many important things he taught me when I was still a chick are the reason I’m here now,” Niko half murmured, and she beat at the chest of the red T-shirt with her right hand. “But that’s exactly why I can’t even imagine it. What kind of place is the Accelerated World for the first Burst Linkers—for the Originators? What would it be like with no parent, no Legion, all you can do is fight and take points from each other, like…”
Naturally, Haruyuki was also unable to truly imagine that situation. But he could vaguely picture it. Because the Armor of Catastrophe he had been fused with until just a few days earlier was itself a product of the depth of the love and sadness of two Originators.
“In a world like that,” Haruyuki said, almost muttering, as he stared hard at Niko sitting cross-legged on the bed, “even in a world that was only fighting like that, I’m sure there were Burst Linkers who could understand each other through the duel. Like the way you and I did, you know?”
“…” Niko made a face like she was wavering between shouting and launching another long-distance attack, and then she smiled slightly, wryly.
“Guess so. Maybe there were one or two like you in those Originators…Anyway, we got off track there. From what I saw, the Green and Blue Kings aren’t really putting it out there. In fact, Purple and Yellow are actually way more up-front.”
“So then…the only Originators at that meeting were those two?” Haruyuki asked.
Niko glanced down on her own right hand, index and middle fingers still standing up, and then moved her thumb a couple times as if hesitating to add to that number.
“Yeah, probably. But, like…maybe…”
“Huh…?”
“Nah, it’s nothing. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is watch your back when you go up against Metatron. It’s not just Purple, who’s obviously hostile to Negabu. We don’t know what Green and Blue are thinking in the depths of their hearts.”
“R-right. Got it. Thanks for worrying about me, Niko.” Haruyuki bowed his head, and the redheaded girl grinned and rolled her small body over onto the bed. After a long yawn, she waved her right hand in the air.
“I’m going to sleep. Gimme the pillow back.”
“Y-you’re the one who threw it…” Grumbling, Haruyuki stood up from the chair and placed the pillow under Niko’s raised head. Which brought him back to his question of a few minutes earlier. “So then where’m I supposed to sleep?”
Niko used both hands to fix the pillow under her head as she rolled over to the left. Just like that, she closed her eyes and said, “’Night, Big Brother.”
This necessarily generated space on the right side, but still, there was the question of whether he could charge in there.
“Uh, um…A-anyway, I’m gonna take a bath, too.” Mumbling, he set aside the issue of the bed and hurriedly escaped from the room.
When he returned from the bathroom twenty minutes later, Niko was already fast asleep, complete with adorably soft snoring.
He picked up the half-empty bottle of water from the sideboard and drank down the lukewarm water before considering the optimal situation. Taking another blanket and going to sleep on the sofa in the living room would have been the gentlemanly solution, but his mother would naturally find him there when she came home. If she asked him about it, the only excuse he could think up was “There was a monster in my room,” and he certainly could not believe she would accept that. That said, it would be too painful to sleep directly on the floor of his room.
“Even if she is in another Legion, that’s still the order of a king and all,” he whispered, overcoming the logical and moral hurdles somehow to mentally brace himself and kneel on the edge of the bed. Keeping the maximum distance from Niko, he smoothly shifted to a position lying on his back and turned the LED lights to night-light mode.
The instant he was blanketed in the dim orange gloom, his eyelids abruptly grew heavy, despite the situation he found himself in. Just as he was about to drift off into sleep, he heard the small voice of Niko, whom he thought was already dead to the world.
“I wasn’t sure if I should, but I’ll tell you this.”
“Huh…? What…?”
“The person who had the Theoretical Mirror ability you’re trying to get.”
Half in a dream, Haruyuki waited for what she would say next.
“His name is Mirror Masker. He’s Ardor Maiden’s…parent.”
6
“Yeeeeeaaaaaahooooooo!!” The shrill cry came at him from behind, accompanied by the roar of a V-twin engine.
Haruyuki didn’t even have time to look behind him, but he felt the heat of the tire spinning a few centimeters behind his toes. He reached his arms out straight ahead, mustered up thrust in his wings, and fled.
It was Tuesday, June 25, 7:50 AM.
In 1-choume Minami Koenji, Suginami Ward—also known as Suginami Area No. 2—a duel
was underway, customary for this place. Ash Roller of the Green Legion versus Silver Crow of the Black Legion—abbreviated to “Ash-Crow.” Obviously, it wasn’t every day, but at some point they had reached an agreement where the one who won the previous round would challenge the other every other day—working out to Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.
The duels between the biker Ash and the flying Crow often played out as a high-speed battle on the ground for the first half, and then, once their special-attack gauges had built up, it turned into 3-D combat in midair in the second half. There were a lot of highlights, and the fighting was fairly showy visually, so the regular Gallery for these matches had been increasing lately. When Haruyuki thought about the people making a detour to watch the duel on their way to school, he always worked hard to give them a passionate, bright, fun fight.
However, things had been a little off since the duel started that day. Ash Roller was, for some reason, excessively fiery—or rather, he was in berserker mode, to the point that steam was coming out of the mouth of his skull helmet.
“All riiiiiiight! You just wait right there, you damned crow!” a raging voice chased at him from behind.
“N-no!!” Haruyuki responded with a high-pitched cry. “If I wait here, I’ll be in a traffic accident!!”
“You think you’d get off that easy?! Traffic fatality’s minus nine points! Yaaaah!!”
“Y-you’re the one who’d lose points on your license!!”
The pair flew around, bantering like this, on the single-lane road that ran west from Kannana Street. Church on the right, library on the left—neither a real building, of course, but rather transformed into something strange: an assemblage of countless metal pipes—the fighters raced past them, just barely above the ground. The twenty or so members of the Gallery who had set the automatic follow mode for these battles appeared one after another on the rooftops of the buildings out front and disappeared again once Crow and Ash had passed them.
Visually confirming a largish intersection up ahead, Haruyuki leaned his avatar to the right and entered a sharp turn. Veering toward the left, he slalomed down the road before kicking against a telephone pole ten meters in front of the intersection and using the reaction to turn on a dime. Sparks shooting off the tips of his wings against the road surface, he slipped through the intersection to the right.