“Ngaah!”
The outer wall immediately closed in on him, so he frantically pulled his chin and stomach in to fight against the centrifugal force. With a margin of mere millimeters, he cleared the corner and heaved a sigh of relief as he returned to flying in a direct line.
That was a satisfying turn, even for him. Given that Ash was several times heavier when counting the motorcycle, he wouldn’t be able to turn with the same speed. Haruyuki could pull away here and get the fight back on track after being basically forced into close combat in the opening—
Whoooaaaaa!!
The cheer of the Gallery interrupted his thoughts, and Haruyuki twitched and looked back. What he saw was a large building crumbling, flames shooting up, and the silhouette of an American motorcycle racing fiercely through those flames. It swerved to the left and right, dodging chunks of falling building, and merged with the road Haruyuki was flying down with basically no damage. Most likely, Ash had seen that he wouldn’t be able to make the turn and had instead destroyed the building ahead of him, tearing open a shortcut.
“Wh…Wha—?!” Haruyuki shouted incredulously before hurriedly accelerating again. But having relaxed momentarily, he couldn’t immediately get back up to top speed. The roar of the engine charged up behind him, and this time the front wheel did touch Crow’s toes. Skreeeenk! A grinding noise rang out, and his health gauge dropped.
“Hot, hot, hot! Wh-wh-why are you so serious todaaaaaay?!” Haruyuki nearly shrieked the question.
Ash Roller flung back an unexpected reply. “Obviousoooooo! You! My adorable baby sis!! You axed her from the curryyyyyy paaaaaartyyyyyyyy!!”
“H-huuuuh?!”
In his great surprise, he lost focus, and once more, the tire ate away at his toes. He was almost dragged down to the road surface, but he endured it desperately, and somehow managed to open up a gap between them once more.
Passing by the ostentatious temples stretching along to his right, Haruyuki earnestly set his brain to work. The “curry party” Ash was talking about had to have been the gathering with the homemade curry held at the Arita house the previous evening. And similarly, the “adorable baby sis” indicated Ash Roller in the real, Fuko Kurasaki’s child, Rin Kusakabe.
As to why Ash referred to his own real self as his little sister, the situation was extremely complicated, and even Haruyuki still didn’t grasp it completely. Roughly speaking, the girl Rin had two Neurolinkers, and the one with Brain Burst installed was the Neurolinker of her older brother who had been in a coma for several years after a motorcycle accident, Rinta Kusakabe. She could only become a Burst Linker when she was using her brother’s Neurolinker. But the personality lodged in the duel avatar known as Ash Roller that appeared in the Accelerated World was not conscious of itself as Rin for some reason, but rather as her older brother, Rinta. Haruyuki couldn’t even begin to guess at what kind of logic was at work there. The one thing he could say was that older brother Ash doted on his little sister, Rin, and in that very instance, he thought that Haruyuki was bullying her, and so he was now furious.
“Y-y-you got it wrong!!” Given that they were moving at such high speeds, their conversation shouldn’t have reached the ears of the Gallery, but even so, Haruyuki lowered his voice as he desperately tried to defend himself. “P-p-people from another Legion came yesterday! I couldn’t exactly invite your little sister!”
“Excuses! No thank yooooouuu!! So then you move the time and you no-problemo it!!”
“W-we didn’t have that kind of leeway! A-and Master explained the situation to your sister, and she said it was okay, though!”
“You! Maybe you got the go-ahead! But her heart was in tear-time! You totally don’t get iiiiiiiiit!!”
An ominous metal sound drowned out the last of his roar of anger, and Haruyuki glanced back to see thick cylinder parts on both sides of the front fork of the American motorcycle. One was already empty. But the other was still loaded with a tapered dual surface-to-surface, surface-to-air ordnance—a missile. And the red lens on the head of it was blinking, locked onto Haruyuki.
“Eee! Eeeeeeee!!” Haruyuki let several screams slip out and paddled both his hands like he was swimming in midair.
If he could ascend straight up and fly into the black clouds blanketing the sky of the stage, he could shake free of the missile. But he couldn’t do that, because this was a nature-type, wind-based Thunder stage. Lightning shot out in all directions in the clouds, and not only that, increasing altitude even slightly meant that he would be hammered mercilessly by lightning bolts. It was one of the stages that Silver Crow—a flying type and with silver armor that had maximum conductivity—was least compatible with.
Naturally, if Ash hit Silver Crow with a missile at this close range, he wouldn’t make it out unscathed, either. But he had 70 percent left in his health gauge in contrast with Crow’s approximately 50 percent. Given that big brother Ash could take some blowback damage no problem, these calculations probably weren’t even in his head.
Since it’s come to this—!! Haruyuki focused his ears on the beeping lock-on sound behind him and waited for the right time.
“Yeah, you fly, you damned Crow!! Howling Paaaaaaaanhead!!” Ash howled the name of the technique.
Haruyuki flipped up and around, spreading his arms out, flying upside down. “S-s-s-special attack! Stop a sword in my haaaaands!” he shouted, his voice cracking, and caught the missile between his palms immediately after it was launched. An instant before the missile could generate any thrust, its fuel ignited, he forced the seeker lens straight up. He immediately released his hands, and the missile shot vertically, trailing white smoke. The Gallery erupted in cheers at the unexpected sight.
This was his chance for a counterattack, but Haruyuki accidentally chased after the ascending missile with his eyes. Ash and the Gallery were similarly looking up at the sky. Showered in the countless gazes, the white missile—or rather, rocket now—quickly drew near the black clouds in the sky above. Several bolts of lightning rained down to strike it and scattered in all directions.
“…Ah,” Haruyuki murmured.
“…Oh,” Ash groaned.
Bolts of lightning chased the fragments of falling missile, charging at the earth to wrap the two Burst Linkers directly below in purple flashing.
“Hngyaaaah!!” Their shrieks rang out over the stage, their skeletons flickering in their silhouettes.
“…Phew…” The duel over and now returned to the real world, Haruyuki leaned back against the guardrail of the pedestrian bridge over the Koenji intersection and let out a long sigh. “…Well, a draw at that point, it was a good fight, huh…”
As he told himself this, Haruyuki added what he had learned that day to the “duel notes” he kept in his head: In a Thunder stage, it was possible to guide the thunderbolts by throwing an easily breakable object up into the sky. And it was possible to change the trajectory of a missile-type weapon immediately after it was launched.
“…I really have so much to learn still…”
About duel techniques, about the history of the Accelerated World… Adding this in his heart, Haruyuki sighed once more.
That morning, the Red King Niko had boldly marched right past the room where his mother was sleeping and returned home to Nerima, leaving that lone piece of information she had dropped in Haruyuki’s mind as he was on the verge of sleep.
The Burst Linker Mirror Masker, the pioneer of the Theoretical Mirror ability, was the parent of Ardor Maiden, one of the Four Elements of Nega Nebulus…It was a difficult story to swallow at first. If that was true, then why hadn’t Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Utai told Haruyuki and the others right away? But when he thought it over, they had actually been a little evasive the previous evening. If there had been some kind of circumstance making them reluctant to speak, it would have to have been deeply connected with the Legion’s—no, with Utai’s—personal past.
“I’ll ask Shinomiya herself today,” Haruyuki resolved out lou
d. If there was a reason to stay quiet about it, Niko wouldn’t have said anything to him to begin with. By announcing the information to him, she had to have been giving him a push.
Looking at the time display in the edge of his field of view, he saw that it was almost 7:55. It wasn’t time for him to start worrying about being late just yet, but even so, he descended the pedestrian bridge at a trot before spotting a large EV bus racing north on Kannana Street and stopped once more.
There was a possibility that the real Ash Roller, Rin Kusakabe, was riding in that bus. She had apparently discovered Silver Crow’s true identity by always looking up at the pedestrian bridge through the window of her bus immediately after an Ash-Crow duel and spotting Haruyuki standing there any number of times. It was such an idiotic way of being cracked in the real, but now that he had been cracked, there was no point in running and hiding.
Still standing in the center of the pedestrian bridge, he stared at the bus drawing near on the road below. It would be nice if the brother’s rage from the duel before had melted away even a bit, he mused as he waited for it to pass by. And then the left turn signal of the bus started flashing, and the vehicle came to a halt at the bus stop a little north of the intersection. The Koenji overpass stop was not near any stations or schools, so buses almost always went right past it. When he looked over with curiosity, he saw the bus quickly pull out again. A single girl had gotten off, and the uniform she was wearing looked familiar to him.
“Ah! R-r-r-ri—” A panicked cry leaked out of him.
The girl looked straight up from the ground and waved her right hand slightly. She started to move at a trot, so Haruyuki also hurriedly headed toward the escalator on that side. He ran down it, almost falling forward, and when he landed at the base of the pedestrian bridge, the girl had also picked up speed. She stumbled once as she ran over and flailed both arms to get her balance before stopping in front of him.
Although they were only about a meter apart now, suddenly he had no words. Um, I guess first I should say something about the duel, or maybe apologize for not being able to invite her to the curry meeting yesterday, or no, wait, first, I should say hello— Round and round his thoughts went.
“Oh! Um. Before, my brother. Was really rude.” The thin voice came from the girl’s mouth, and her slightly curly hair was thrown forward as she bowed.
“Huh? No, not at all. I mean, I should be the one apologizing for yesterday!”
They both bowed low, and the crowns of their heads brushed against each other. Panicking that this was no longer an apology, but an attack, Haruyuki yanked his body back upright and moved to take a step back.
The girl grabbed onto his schoolbag, and after she, too, righted herself, Rin Kusakabe smiled faintly, eyes teary.
The reason she had gotten off the bus was apparently because she wanted to apologize for the way Ash Roller had been acting in the duel. Naturally, she would have to get on the next bus heading to Shibuya, so Haruyuki suggested they go back to the bus stop and talk.
“Um, are you okay? For time?”
“I’m fine. I’ve still got plenty of time before they close the school gates.” As he spoke, he checked the bus information displayed in his field of view. According to the schedule, the next bus would arrive in four minutes. They wouldn’t be able to talk for very long, but it was enough time to apologize again.
He turned to Rin again, still clutching his schoolbag, and carefully lowered his head once more. “Kusakabe, I’m really sorry about yesterday. I wanted to invite you, too, but…I couldn’t exactly make you meet the senior members of Prominence in the real…”
“N-no, Master explained. The situation to me, and I. Agreed. But my brother just went ahead and. Did that.” Her eyes grew increasingly teary as she spoke. Around her neck was a largish metallic gray Neurolinker, a long crack like a lightning bolt in the exterior shell.
It was the Neurolinker her older brother Rinta, the motorcycle racer, had used. She could only duel as a Burst Linker when she was wearing it. When she took it off and put on her own Neurolinker immediately after the duel, her memories of the duel time gradually grew hazy and all but disappeared within half a day, becoming something that had happened in a dream. Put another way, only now could Rin could remember the fine details of what Ash had said and done in the duel.
“Ah, ha-ha-ha! He’s a good brother. And a serious duel like that is fun sometimes, too. It ended with that big show, too, so the Gallery was pretty pleased.”
“R…eally?”
Faced with her teary, dubious gaze and upturned grayish eyes, Haruyuki couldn’t stop his respiration rate, pulse, and temperature from all spiking dramatically. A mere five days earlier, Rin Kusakabe had told him clearly, pressed completely up against him so that there was no room for him to have misheard: “I like you.”
W-well, that was because I was on the brink of vanishing from the Accelerated World together with the armor. Basically, talk under martial law goes back to civilian control when things are normal.
The ambiguous declaration calmed him to some extent, and he bobbed his head up and down. “R-really. I’m always the most excited about duels with Ash. The win rate’s exactly fifty-fifty, and I can think of all kinds of strategies in advance because he’s an opponent I know really well.”
“You. Can?” Head hanging deeply, Rin’s lovely lips moved in the shape of “I’m so happy,” and his heart once again skipped several beats.
However, the problem was when Rin’s emotions swelled, her older brother Ash in the Accelerated World remembered it with fairly high fidelity. If they stayed here facing each other like this, he might go into berserker mode again—“You damned crow! Touching my baby sis!”—in the next duel. Although Ash had gotten angry this time at the fact that Haruyuki had stayed away from Rin, not inviting her over for curry, so either way it was ridiculous…
His thoughts had reached this point when he remembered something. “Oh, right! Kusakabe?”
“…Yes?” Rin lifted her face.
“My school festival’s this Sunday, so…if you have time, do you want to come?” he asked, working hard to sound as casual as possible. “I have some extra invitations.”
Instantly, Rin’s face lit up, although her voice became even weaker for some reason. “Are you. Sure? Um, I do. Want to go, I really. Want to go.”
He nodded and smiled in return, but a cold sweat abruptly ran down his back. Inviting a girl anywhere was, for Haruyuki, the most difficult mission in the real world. Even asking Chiyuri, whom he had known since they were born, to tag-team with him in a duel after school required thirty minutes of advance mental preparation.
Fortunately, with perfect timing, an icon popped up to notify him of the bus’s arrival. When he looked up at the road, the light green body of the vehicle jutted out from the row of passenger vehicles.
“O-okay, I’ll mail you the details later. Say hi to your brother for me.” That last part was for both Ash Roller in the Accelerated World and Rinta Kusakabe in the real world, whom Rin went to visit in the hospital every day after school. Apparently understanding this, Rin nodded and reluctantly let go of Haruyuki’s bag.
She started to turn toward the approaching bus, but then stopped and said, unexpectedly, “Um. Next, I’m thinking of. Putting four missiles on the. Motorcycle.”
Gulp.
Shrinking back into himself, Haruyuki somehow managed to answer with a smile. “Th-that’ll be nice, won’t it? Really nice.”
A bright grin instantly spread across her face, and after waving lightly, she got on the bus waiting before them. He watched as the large vehicle drove off accompanied by the low whine of the motor, and then he let out another long sigh.
He had wrestled a little the previous night with whether or not to invite Rin to the school festival when it had absolutely nothing to do with Brain Burst; but when he thought about it as easing Ash’s anger, he could maybe attach a real reason to the invitation. Maybe. At any rate, Ash was a solid memb
er of the large Legion Great Wall, and maintaining friendly relations was a critical mission. Definitely.
If there was one problem, it was that the school festival at Umesato was not just displays and presentations in the real-world classrooms and gyms; they were also working hard on a full-dive event on the local net. A connection to the local net was essential to truly enjoy the school festival, but giving a Burst Linker from another Legion that permission was a bit of an issue in terms of the security of the entire Legion.
“But, well, Kusakabe already knows all of us in the real anyway.” So that “no-problemo’d” it, Haruyuki decided, climbing the escalator back up to the pedestrian bridge.
He slipped through the gates five minutes before they closed, and when he entered eighth grade class C, Takumu and Chiyuri were already in their seats.
The kendo team and the track team were coming up on tournaments in the middle of July, so they both left for school more than an hour earlier than Haruyuki did for morning practice. After school, they also took part in Legion missions when practice was over, and Haruyuki honestly worried that they were pushing themselves too hard.
However, they said the experience of the Accelerated World was useful in their team activities. And naturally, though not in the sense that they would use acceleration in the middle of a meet. The ability to concentrate, the intellectual aspects—in other words, the positive mental effects—were nothing to sneeze at. Taku often said that when he remembered the battle with Dusk Taker, he didn’t flinch in the face of any opponent, even if that opponent was a champion. However, the fact that Dusk Taker, Seiji Nomi, still trained hard with Takumu as a seventh-grade member of the Umesato kendo team…Haruyuki did actually have some complicated feelings when he heard about that.