At any rate, it wasn’t as though Haruyuki didn’t want to make use of whatever it was he learned in Brain Burst out in the real world, but given that he was in the Animal Care Club, rather than a sports team or some cultural club, it was fairly difficult to do that. In fact, he had actually learned mental preparedness when flying in the Accelerated World from Hoo, the northern white-faced owl in the animal hutch.
That’s okay, though. My goal is the same as Kuroyukihime’s: to see the ending of Brain Burst. All the duels, all the time I spend in the Accelerated World is for that purpose. I can’t forget that the objective to gain the Theoretical Mirror ability, attack the Archangel Metatron, and destroy the ISS kit main body in Tokyo Midtown Tower is, in the end, connected to that horizon, he told himself as he took his seat just as the first bell rang.
His homeroom teacher, Sugeno, came in through the door at the front, and the student on classroom helper duty that day gave the order to stand and bow. Haruyuki’s thoughts, which threatened to wander off into the Accelerated World, were pulled back, and he called out “Good morning” with the rest of his classmates.
7
Snap open.
Peek, snap shut.
After repeating this series of actions ten or so times, Haruyuki groaned quietly. He was sitting on a wooden bench placed just that week in front of the animal hutch at the western edge of Umesato’s rear yard. It wasn’t new—for more than ten years, it had gone without use in the storeroom of the second school building, but it was solidly built. Her Excellency the vice president of the student council had neatly manipulated the list of furnishings on the school server and bestowed it upon the Animal Care Club. The branches of a camphor tree stretched out above his head, so he wouldn’t get wet in a little rain shower.
He had already finished changing the paper spread out in the animal hutch and cleaning the water tub, and the owl Hoo was drowsily sitting on the perch on the other side of the wire mesh. After glancing at him, Haruyuki went again to open the thin tool in the palm of his hand…
“Prez, sorry. You done cleaning already?”
The voice suddenly flew into his ears, and he snapped to attention on the bench. The object in his hand tumbled to the ground in reaction, and a pale hand scooped it up before he could. Unable to immediately accept the proffered item—a small mirror with the Umesato crest on the case that he had bought at the school shop over lunch—he blinked rapidly for a moment.
“What’s wrong?” Still holding the mirror, speaking in a doubtful voice, was another member of the Animal Care Club, eighth grade class B’s Reina Izeki. Just as the long hair with ringlets, the sharp eyeliner, and the decorated Neurolinker indicated, she normally belonged to a caste far, far away from Haruyuki.
Why’s someone like you got a mirror? He had unconsciously expected her to say something like that, but Reina simply cocked her head. Thinking that if he was asked that question, he would say that it was to send an SOS by reflecting sunlight if he were shipwrecked, Haruyuki moved his stiff right hand to take the mirror.
“Th-thanks, Izeki,” he said hoarsely, and quickly tucked it away in the pocket of his uniform.
“Yup,” she responded briefly before turning toward the hutch and waving brightly at Hoo. The owl conscientiously flapped its wings restlessly and deliberately and returned the greeting.
“Oh yeah, so what’re we gonna show at the school festival?” Reina turned around and asked.
It took him a second and a half to realize that by “we” she meant the Animal Care Club. “Oh…Y-yeah. I thought we’d borrow an empty classroom and have the visitors take a look at Hoo, but he only just moved here. So I figured maybe it would be too stressful to be seen by a bunch of people, and I gave up on that for this year.”
“Hmm, that’s our prez.” She nodded as if agreeing with him, and then took a few steps before dropping down on the bench. She stared at Haruyuki out of the corner of her eye, a strangely meaningful smile crossing her face. “So why were you staring at that mirror? Maybe you’ve got a date after this?”
“N-n-n-no!” Waving both hands wildly, he seriously considered whether or not he should put into practice the excuse from before.
But before he could, Reina nodded as if to say “I won’t tell anyone,” and then added, as if it had just popped into her mind, “But the mirrors they sell here are acrylic, so I wouldn’t really recommend them, you know.”
“Huh? A-acrylic? What’s that?”
“Like…it’s obviously plastic. Here, lemme look.”
Having been thus told, Haruyuki had no choice but to pull the mirror out of his pocket and open it.
“Here.” Reina tapped the surface of the mirror with a longish fingernail. “If this is acrylic, it distorts, and the color kinda changes, too.” She dug around in her bag, which was sitting at the base of the bench, and pulled out a portable mirror that was clearly top quality. Deftly flipping it open with one hand, she offered it to Haruyuki. “This is high-precision colored glass. See how they’re different?”
Obediently, Haruyuki looked back and forth between the mirror with the school crest in his left hand and the one with the brand-name logo in his right.
The reason he had been opening and closing the compact mirror over and over a few minutes earlier was because when he tried to look at the mirror, he necessarily saw his own round face. But for the moment, he forgot that fear and compared the round face that appeared in the two mirrors.
“Oh…Wow, they’re totally different.” The quality of the images on the left and one on the right were so different that it made him cry out involuntarily in admiration. The mirror on the left had a cheap coloring to it, like it was coming through colorless sheet plastic, while in contrast, the mirror on the right was so clear, he could almost believe that he was looking at the real thing with his own eyes.
While he looked back and forth between the two, Haruyuki got a prickly sensation in the core of his head like he was approaching something really important. In other words, a mirror was—the more the mirror…
But when he had managed to get that far in his thoughts, the sensation disappeared from his head. He lifted his gaze, and Reina explained further.
“It’s, like, different, right? I mean, forget the distortion. You don’t want the color to be different when you’re putting on makeup. Those huge mirrors at salons and stuff, they cost like fifty thousand.”
“…I—I get it.” This made a deep kind of sense and also reconfirmed that he really had no need for something like this. He returned the expensive mirror in his right hand to Reina.
“So, Prez, who’s you going out with?”
“I—I told you, it’s not like that!”
“Oh, maybe the super prez?” The “super president” Reina referred to was the president who surpassed the club president, just as she noted—in other words, the legitimate owner of Hoo and the shadow ruler of the Animal Care Club. “Hmm, I dunno. Like, fourth grade’s kinda dodgy?”
“N-n-n-n-n-n-n—!”
“Oh, here she is.”
He jerked his head up and saw a small form walking across the rear yard from the direction of the school gates. He didn’t need to see the white uniform dress, the brown backpack, and the right hand carrying a bag to know that it was the Super President of the Umesato Animal Care Club, Utai Shinomiya.
“Heeeey, super prez! So, like, just now, the prez…”
“No— Noooooo!”
At the same time as Haruyuki shrieked, Hoo, detecting Utai nearby, began to beat his wings loudly.
Once the highlight of the club work—feeding time—was over, Reina signed the log file and headed home. “’Kay, you guys take your time!”
UI> WHAT DOES SHE MEAN “TAKE OUR TIME”? Utai typed, in curiosity.
“M-maybe uploading the log? I mean, like the school net traffic, it’s like, you know,” he tried to explain awkwardly as he wiped the sweat from his brow.
Perhaps kind enough to be fooled by this, Utai nodded with an
ambiguous look on her face and started to clean up the cooler she had set on the bench.
As he watched her small back, a voice came back to life in his ears: His name is Mirror Masker. He’s Ardor Maiden’s…parent.
Haruyuki had thought he would ask Utai directly about what Niko had told him once the work for the club was done that day. But now that he actually had the chance, he couldn’t quite manage to bring it up.
When he thought about it, he had come all this way not having the slightest idea about the parents of the three veteran Burst Linkers in Nega Nebulus—Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Utai. Kuroyukihime had told him before that she would talk to him about her parent when the time came that she could, and he had made an effort to never touch on it again. But he hadn’t even thought about discovering the parents of Fuko and Utai, much less ask about them.
One thing he could say was that if they were still close with their parents, it wouldn’t have been particularly strange for them to introduce him to them. Given that not only had he not been introduced, he hadn’t even been told their names, there had to have been a reason why they couldn’t or why they didn’t want to. Thus, Haruyuki continued to hesitate for a long time as he stared at Utai’s back.
Almost as if she sensed this, Utai stopped her cleaning and looked back at him. With eyes that had a faint hint of crimson racing through the irises, she looked directly into his eyes.
“Um…” As if he’d been sucked into those clear eyes, brief words spilled from his mouth. “Shinomiya, your…”
But he didn’t give voice to the rest. Utai kept staring quietly at his face, and then finally, she moved her small hands, and text scrolled slowly across his virtual desktop. UI> ARITA, YOU ALREADY KNOW, DON’T YOU? ABOUT MY PARENT.
Swallowing his breath and not letting it out again for a while, Haruyuki steadied himself and nodded. “Yeah. The Red King told me yesterday. She said your parent was the creator of the Theoretical Mirror ability.”
Utai didn’t react immediately. After a silence of five seconds or so, a faint smile crossed her peach-colored lips.
UI> NIKO WAS BEING CONSIDERATE OF ME. AND SACCHI AND FU, TOO. PLEASE DON’T BLAME THEM FOR NOT SAYING ANYTHING YESTERDAY. THEY WERE WAITING FOR ME TO MAKE A DECISION. AND NIKO, THROUGH YOU, IS GIVING ME A LITTLE PUSH.
Unable to immediately grasp the meaning of this, Haruyuki reread the text displayed on his virtual desktop several times. And then he finally understood: Utai did actually have a thick, high wall in her heart when it came to her own parent. Naturally, Kuroyukihime and Fuko had guessed at this situation, but Niko had, too. She had struggled with it, and then made a decision. By telling Haruyuki the truth, she would make Utai take a step forward.
Pursing his lips, Haruyuki waited.
After another few seconds, Utai tapped at her keyboard with resolute fingers, but the text she sent to him was far heavier than anything he had expected.
UI> MY PARENT, MIRROR MASKER, IS ACTUALLY MY OLDER BROTHER. BUT MY OLDER BROTHER IS NO LONGER IN THE ACCELERATED WORLD. She paused momentarily.
UI> NOR IN THE REAL WORLD.
After putting everything away, Utai sat Haruyuki down on the empty bench and then sat down next to him. The slightly overcast sky was colored a pale orange. The voices of the baseball team echoed faintly from the grounds. And although there were still a large number of students in the school busy with preparations for the school festival, that activity didn’t reach the rear yard.
Dropping his gaze to the mossy ground, Haruyuki couldn’t decide what to say—or even if he should say anything at all. The text Utai had typed out a few minutes earlier was still displayed in the chat window on his virtual desktop. No matter how many times he read it, the meaning was clear: Utai’s parent Burst Linker was her real older brother, and he was no longer alive. And not in the sense of losing all his points and exiting the Accelerated World. He had really died in the real world.
Haruyuki was fourteen that year, but he had never experienced the death of anyone close to him. The closest thing he’d experienced to it was the time Kuroyukihime had sustained serious injuries the year before, protecting him from a car running wild. Just remembering the night he had spent in the hallway of the hospital praying for her recovery made his heart beat faster and sweat ooze from his palms.
But what if…He didn’t want to think about it, but what if they hadn’t been able to save her then? Haruyuki couldn’t even imagine where he would be now. At the very least, he wouldn’t be laughing and having fun with duels every day like he was now.
UI> I AM SORRY.
A single line of text scrolled across the chat window abruptly, and Haruyuki blinked. Before he could muster some kind of reaction, Utai’s fingers were tapping at the lap of her white skirt once more.
UI> I KNEW THAT IT WOULD ONLY TROUBLE YOU IF I DIDN’T SAY SOMETHING. BUT IN MY HEAD, EVERYTHING WAS SUCH A JUMBLE.
“Th-there was no rush. I mean, if you didn’t want to, you didn’t have to say anything.” The words fell from Haruyuki’s lips. “I mean, I’m sorry for not saying anything. I’m four years older, but…I couldn’t say anything…”
UI> WELL THEN, I AM TWO LEVELS HIGHER, AFTER ALL.
He unconsciously turned his gaze toward her at this about-face; on Utai’s face was the usual gentle smile. But beneath it, a faint desolateness seemed to bleed through.
Abruptly, a certain scene came back to life in Haruyuki’s mind. It was the time he and Utai had charged into the Castle in the Unlimited Neutral Field. When they had slipped past the eyes of the patrolling soldier Enemies and successfully infiltrated the inner sanctuary, Ardor Maiden had said, “It’s just that since we got here, I’ve steadily felt more and more like I could rely on you, C. Almost like…my older brother.” To this, Haruyuki had responded, “Mei, you have an older brother? What grade’s he in?” But Utai hadn’t answered; she’d just smiled sadly instead.
As if she had seen through with her wide eyes to the memory that Haruyuki called up, Utai moved her fingers gently.
UI> WITH YOUR ARMOR COLOR, YOU REALLY DID RESEMBLE HIM QUITE A BIT THAT TIME. MY OLDER BROTHER, HE ALWAYS GUIDED ME, GENTLY BUT FIRMLY…MIRROR MASKER. WHICH IS EXACTLY WHY…I WAS FEARFUL PERHAPS. OF YOU APPROACHING MY BROTHER ANY FURTHER BY OBTAINING THE THEORETICAL MIRROR ABILITY.
“Shinomiya…”
UI> ONCE AGAIN, I MUST APOLOGIZE TO YOU, ARITA. I KNEW RIGHT FROM THE START. THAT SIMPLY EXPOSING YOURSELF TO A POWERFUL LIGHT TECHNIQUE WOULD NOT ALLOW YOU TO GAIN THE POWER YOU SEEK. BECAUSE THE MIRROR THAT WAS IN MY BROTHER’S HEART IS NOT A PHYSICAL PRESENCE MADE OF GLASS AND SILVER.
The instant he read this, Haruyuki felt something spark deep in his head. He caught hold of the tail of the thought that had begun to form when he compared the mirror he bought at the shop and the mirror Reina Izeki had lent him maybe half an hour earlier, and pulled on that thought cautiously.
“Yeah…I think I get that, sort of. A mirror…the more perfect it is, the less it’s a ‘thing.’ I mean, if there was a mirror that could completely reflect all light, you wouldn’t actually be able to see it, right? You’d just see the other things reflected there. So then…um, uh…”
Once again, he reached the limits of his verbal prowess, but Utai opened her eyes slightly wider, a smile with a different nuance crossing on her face.
UI> I’M SURPRISED. YOU’VE MANAGED TO REACH THAT POINT ALL UNDER YOUR OWN POWER, HMM?
“Huh…? Th-that point? What point?” he unconsciously asked the stupid question, but Utai’s fingers didn’t move for a while, the smile still lingering on her lips.
Finally, she nodded, as if having made some kind of decision, and tapped on the lap of her skirt. Tak, tak, tak, tak.
UI> ARITA. DO YOU WANT TO SEE WITH YOUR OWN EYES? THE MIRROR THAT MY BROTHER HAD LODGED IN HIS HEART?
The question was abrupt, and it was hard for him to grasp entirely what it meant, but Haruyuki nodded deeply. “Yeah. I do. I feel like if I saw it, I could make it there.”
UI> UNDE
RSTOOD. WELL THEN, SHALL WE GO?
“Go?” Haruyuki asked. “To the Unlimited Neutral Field?”
Utai was briefly puzzled and then shook her head decisively. UI> NO. TO MY HOUSE IN THE REAL WORLD. WE MIGHT BE A LITTLE LATE GETTING IN, SO I THINK YOU’D BETTER LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR YOUR HOUSEHOLD.
8
Roughly speaking, Tokyo’s Suginami Ward was a diamond shape that leaned downward to the right. The Koenji area, where Haruyuki’s condo and Umesato Junior High were located, sat on the eastern corner of the diamond. If you went west from there, you reached the Asagaya housing complex where Kuroyukihime lived. To the southwest was the Matsunoki area, where the elementary school Utai attended was. He was pretty sure that the Omiya area, to the south of that, was Utai’s home address.
Walking alongside her in her white uniform on the brick promenade that stretched south from Umesato, Haruyuki remembered that they had done the same thing on the day they first met. That time, when they entered the Omiya area, they sat down on a bench placed along the promenade and had a tag-team duel. Their opponents had been Bush Utan and Olive Grab from the Green Legion. In the middle of the battle, Utan had activated the power of the ISS kit, pushing Haruyuki to his wits’ end, but Utai had repelled Olive, who was using the same power, and emerged completely unscathed before calling up an enormous storm of flames and burning Utan to a crisp.
The same thing couldn’t possibly happen again today. The thought flickered through his mind, but fortunately, that day, she didn’t say PLEASE SHOW ME YOUR ACTUAL ABILITIES, but instead continued walking. Haruyuki was carrying the bag with Hoo’s dinner set in it, but even taking that away, Utai’s pace was so quick you almost couldn’t feel the difference in their heights. Her back was perfectly straight, and the way she moved her feet smoothly forward, it looked as though she had had some kind of footwork training.
The address display on his virtual desktop’s navigation map changed to Omiya 1-choume, and once they had gone another two hundred meters or so, they veered east off the promenade. Around them was a residential neighborhood full of old houses, and marks indicating shrines and temples popped up all over the place on the map.