The Red Storm Princess

  Copyright

  ACCEL WORLD, Volume 2

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Jocelyn Allen

  Cover art by HIMA

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ACCEL WORLD

  © REKI KAWAHARA 2009

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2009 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2014 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: October 2017

  Originally published in paperback in November 2014 by Yen On.

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  ISBN: 978-1-9753-0084-5

  E3-20171013-JV-PC

  Haruyuki stared through the eyes of his pig avatar at the gray, counterclockwise streaks making helixes within six steel holes. Nothing existed in the space around him. There were only white floors and white walls and a white ceiling encompassing him—a vast, empty room.

  The bluish hunk of steel alone in the center of the room was a large automatic handgun. The hairline-finished slide, the checkering carved into the grip, the overwhelming weight and density of the weapon, and the very coolness of the thing could all be seen and felt, but of course, it was not the real thing. This device of unknown make and model was a virtual substitute Haruyuki had selected at random, from gun polygon elements placed here.

  But it did shoot bullets. For that purpose, he had it pointed at the brow of his avatar, which stood a mere twenty meters away.

  He had cobbled together this VR training app, referring constantly to the manual as he did, and the dreariness of the perfectly white room had actually depressed him when he first dived into it. What he had really wanted to make was the roof of a skyscraper, with a dark-suited hit man holding the gun, but the burden of creating all that was too much for a simple gamer still in junior high.

  Had he asked her—his teacher, more experienced at these things than he was—she likely would’ve slapped it together for him in seconds, no matter how elaborate the specs. But Haruyuki hadn’t asked. He’d been afraid she would wonder why he was practicing such remedial stuff this late in the game. In the end, he’d managed to create a substitute that was the epitome of dreary: a single, clumsy handgun floating in a room that was so totally and completely white it literally made his eyeballs hurt.

  But when he actually used the program, he wasn’t entirely displeased with the way it had turned out. Either way, the gun was the only thing in the room other than himself. Whether he wanted to or not, he had no choice but to focus on its muzzle.

  Crouching in the body of his pink pig avatar, Haruyuki slowly spread his arms wide, all the while staring intently at a single black hole.

  He’d long since lost any sense of time and had no idea how many minutes he’d exhausted carrying on this way. The app’s programming was exceedingly simple: Once he positioned himself and called out, “Start,” the handgun automatically targeted Haruyuki and fired a single shot within a thirty-minute time frame following a five-second countdown.

  Naturally had this been the real world, he’d just die, unable to do anything. But this was a virtual space created by his Neurolinker. The bullet’s speed and distance were calibrated to allow him to avoid the projectile if he reacted the instant he saw the muzzle fire.

  The issue, however, was that he had absolutely no idea when in those thirty minutes the gun would discharge. Nothing existed here to allow him to read the ball’s trajectory or timing, unlike in the virtual squash game at which he was so adept. All he could do was keep his eyes open and maintain his concentration.

  But this was exceptionally difficult. Right from the jump, his ability to focus for long periods had been nothing to write home about. When he started this training a month earlier, the nervous tension of the situation had broken in a mere two or three minutes, after which he would unconsciously start going through the Kuroyukihime album in his mind, and just when he was smiling faintly to himself, he would take a merciless slug from an invisible assassin.

  But Haruyuki had made this app himself, which was exactly why he stubbornly persisted with the training.

  At any rate, his opponent was a single, stationary gun. Given that Field duels were fought for a full thirty minutes by battle-seasoned stalwarts whipping out a variety of awe-inspiring and overstimulating techniques, this training was almost easy.

  Haruyuki’s plan had been to increase the number of guns to five within a month. But here he was, still struggling with a single bullet fired from a lone pistol.

  He had no talent. He’d known that right from the start. But if he didn’t even try to train and stretch what little talent might lie buried within him, she would forever be higher than him—he would never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her.

  Damn. Dammit! I have to get faster, I have to be stronger. For her. So I can keep being her partner.

  The impatience growing in Haruyuki’s heart turned to noise, stiffening his avatar’s limbs.

  Almost as if the gun had been waiting for this, the trigger moved with a faint, metallic rasp. The hammer hit the firing pin. The slide recoiled, and the muzzle spit out an orange flash.

  “Ngh..…!!” Haruyuki threw himself into a leap to the right, but his initial reaction was the tiniest bit off, and the spinning bullet gouged his left cheek up to his ear.

  The impact, on par with getting slammed by a massive hammer, sent him flying helplessly. He yelped at the searing pain ripping through his body all over again as he bounced across the white floor.

  “Ah! Aaaah!!” He held his head in his short hand and continued screaming as he rolled across the floor.

  He had slapped an illegal patch on this app, one pulled from the net to neuter the default pain absorber built into his Neurolinker. He’d also cranked up the gain on the pain generator, so this shooter app he’d built could deliver a shock to the diver essentially equivalent to actually getting shot.

  “Ah…ah!!”

  Haruyuki writhed on the floor, tears in his eyes, his entire body convulsing. This made three times today that he’d endured this pain. Since embarking on this training a month ago, he couldn’t count the number of times it’d happened. But he felt like he would never get the least bit used to it, no matter how many times it seared him. On the other hand, he was currently operating at what was basically the upper limit of his pain threshold as he’d quickly acclimated himself to the previous levels he’d set.

  However, an advers
e effect of this was that occasionally Haruyuki’s Neurolinker would detect these abnormal brain waves, activate the safety, and automatically disengage the full dive. This function was hardwired, which meant it couldn’t simply be hacked. The Neurolinker hit that hard limit now, and the white room before him disappeared without warning.

  Gravity’s axes suddenly changed. The real world rushed back from the depths of darkness, dragged out like a starburst. Tears were spilling out of Haruyuki’s real eyes, and what met his blurred, distorted vision was the utterly familiar blue-gray door of the boys’ washroom stall.

  Although he could dive during school now because she had exorcised his bullies, leaving no one around to play tricks on his body while he was in a full dive, Haruyuki would be in serious trouble if a teacher found out about such a dangerous program. But he had an even more important reason for diving in the washroom, if only when using this app. The lingering remnants of intense pain and the shock of being abruptly yanked out of a full dive threw Haruyuki’s nervous system into such confusion that everything around him spun slightly—the mere thought of which was enough to send his stomach careening upward.

  “…Hrngh!” Haruyuki clamped a hand over his mouth, dropped to the floor from his perch on the closed lid of the toilet, turned around, and flipped the lid up.

  He just barely made it, and the backward flow from his digestive organs was entirely confined within the region meant to contain it. After those organs had repeatedly emptied themselves, he stretched out a limp hand and pushed the button on the wall.

  Haruyuki felt the whirling water close to his face but couldn’t muster the energy to get up, and he stayed slumped over the toilet. The tears running down his face slid off to be swallowed up immediately by the toilet’s flow.

  These tears weren’t just the byproduct of the extreme pain and the vomiting. His own weakness frustrated him, and Haruyuki clenched his teeth tightly, shoulders shaking.

  This training was only supposed to improve his basic reaction speed—in duels, depending on who your opponent was, you could be showered by rapid gunfire in the space of a few seconds. And yet despite the goal of his training, Haruyuki was a month in and his evasion rate had only barely increased, from 20 to 30 percent.

  She said he should take his time, get stronger at his own pace. But Haruyuki couldn’t help but fear that the depths of those eyes actually harbored a deep disappointment.

  It had already been three months since Haruyuki first used a function hidden in his Neurolinker to accelerate his thoughts, obtained from the fighting game Brain Burst—where one fought on a battlefield that was half reality—and become a Burst Linker, a player in that game.

  Initially, Silver Crow, the duel avatar he controlled, had been able to leverage the enormous advantage of being the only avatar with the ability to fly to make easy progress. He’d reached level two after a mere week; within a month, he’d moved up to level three. He’d even started believing he might actually be a real hero in that world.

  But it was all just fleeting glory, gone the moment someone figured out his weakness: Flying also meant your whole body was constantly exposed to enemy eyes. Faced with sharpshooting abilities wielded by a sniper so fast and accurate it would be nearly impossible to see the bullet, he was nothing more than a sitting duck.

  When Haruyuki finally made it to level four, he became mired in a series of eternal stalemates. There was a total lack of progress on their current objective—the expansion of the domain held by his Legion, Nega Nebulus—and just maintaining their sovereignty over the area around his school required their undivided attention.

  Territories—areas controlled by Legions—were recognized by the system when a Legion maintained a better than 50 percent win average in the Territory Battle Time set aside each Saturday evening. During that period, groups challenged rivals of equal number, regardless of level. Members of a Legion were given the right to refuse a duel in territories under their Legion’s control, even when their Neurolinkers were connected globally.

  But as a result of other Burst Linkers studying Silver Crow’s unique abilities, the enemy teams that came after them during the group fighting time invariably included a duel avatar with impressive antiaircraft abilities, leading Haruyuki to hang up basic flight. Which meant that Silver Crow was nothing more than a close-range fighter who couldn’t take a hit to save his life. His win rate dropped before his eyes, and his teammates, Cyan Pile and Black Lotus, were constantly forced to cover him.

  Which was the reason for the special training.

  If he could dodge at least half of the antiaircraft attacks, he could identify the shooter’s position and then crush them with his superpowerful sudden-drop attack. That’s what he’d been thinking when he put the app together, but he didn’t feel like he was getting any results at all. If he couldn’t dodge a bullet even when he knew exactly where it was coming from, how was he supposed to avoid an anti-aerial assault coming from the shadow of some obstacle on the duel field?

  She didn’t show any impatience or annoyance on the surface. On the contrary, she gently encouraged him every time he racked up another ugly defeat in the Territory fights. But the disappointment that was surely building inside her scared Haruyuki half out of his mind.

  And if I end up dropping even further…

  Lately, he’d catch thoughts like this popping up, shocking even himself. If he was just going to let her down, it would have been better if none of this had ever happened. His old habit of running away reared its ugly head, and little by little, the desire swelled in the very bottom of Haruyuki’s heart.

  He’d thought he could change. For a time, he’d believed that the moment he’d accepted that copy of Brain Burst and become a Burst Linker, he’d turned into someone different. But in the end, it was just same old, same old. School or virtual battlefield, wherever he went, he seemed destined to be nothing more than the very lowest of the losers.

  Jiggling, round body still crouched in the toilet stall, Haruyuki squeezed his eyes shut and tried to banish his negative thoughts. He forced his voice from his throat, which still burned with the pain of his gastric acids.

  “…Still…I…” But he couldn’t get out the words that came next. This Haruyuki lacked even the strength to talk himself down.

  As the dismissal bell signaling the end of school rang directly in his head via the local net, Haruyuki muttered silently.

  …I want to be strong.

  I want to be stronger.

  1

  “Big brother! Welcome home!”

  Arriving home, Haruyuki had taken his shoes off and trudged about halfway down the hallway to his room when he heard a voice from the living room to his left.

  “Thanks,” he muttered automatically, almost unintelligible. He took another step, then another, and on the third, he yanked up the emergency brake hard.

  Huh?

  What was that?

  As far as Haruyuki knew, the thirteen years and ten months since the birth of the human being known as Haruyuki Arita had been an unbroken chain of only-child-dom. And he thought he was grateful and happy for this fact, rather than have it be a source of dissatisfaction, but perhaps the truth was that he nurtured an unconscious loneliness, which had finally resulted in auditory hallucinations.

  I’m no one’s big brother, am I? Especially not a girl with a cute voice like that? Little sisters only show up in horror movies, right?

  Haruyuki was still standing there awkwardly quizzing himself when he heard the sound of the impossible once again. A singsong humming. Small slippers slapping against the floor. He even smelled something sweet. Hallucinated…scent? Was that possible?

  The bag on his shoulder fell with a thud, and he whirled around a hundred and eighty degrees to stumble clumsily into the living room.

  And then his hallucination even became visual.

  There, in the kitchenette immediately to the left when you entered the room—a space almost never used for its designated function under
normal circumstances—was where it hovered.

  Probably about ten years old. Skinny enough as to be surprising and wrapped in a white blouse and navy skirt, obviously the uniform of some elementary school. The look was completed by suspenders and a pink apron over the top. Pigtailed red hair hung finely on both sides of its head, and the face below the round, smooth forehead was a shape that was nothing other than cherubic. Possibly biracial? Little freckles scattered across the milk-colored skin, the large eyes also a red-tinged green. His overall impression in sum was…

  An angel? A vision from the heavens?

  He stared, slackjawed, robbed of his ability to think. The girl flashed him an adorable smile before saying, “I’m baking cookies right now. You just wait a minute, okay, big brother?”

  “Aaaah!” Haruyuki decided it was time to scream and tucked his round body behind the living room door. Unable to make heads or tails of the situation, he warily poked out just the top half of his head.

  The girl tilted her own head to one side, looking perplexed, but soon smiled once again before turning around to peek into the oven. The two gatherings of red hair shook gently as she did, shining in the winter light coming through the window.

  Having gotten to this point, Haruyuki finally decided that she was no hallucination. However unbelievable the situation seemed, the girl was too real. Which meant…she had to be malware uploaded to his Neurolinker. An ultradetailed 3-D model had been added to his vision, with extra false data for the sounds and smells. Although he couldn’t see why anyone would do something like this.

  I mean, there’s no way I actually have a sister.

  If it was a polygon fake, there was no reason to be afraid. Chuckling to himself, Haruyuki stepped into the kitchen and reached his right hand out toward his “little sister” as she looked up at him with a smile. He then grabbed a freckle-spattered cheek and yanked.

  The Neurolinker, communicating on the quantum level with the wearer’s consciousness, was capable of generating a virtual world that was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from reality if limited to the senses of sight and hearing.