The Red Storm Princess

  “Shut up! Don’t say anything! Don’t look at me! Go away!” she shrieked, still flopped atop the sofa, pumping her legs in the air, and rubbing her eyes hard with her right arm. Then they flew open abruptly, and she cried out as if surprised, “Anyway!!”

  “Huh?”

  “Anyway, why am I telling you all this stuff?! Just forget it, all of it!! All this now was lies!! If you don’t forget it right here and now, I will knock your face in!!” she ranted and raved only half audibly.

  Haruyuki automatically reached out with both hands to stop her legs, which flailed as if trying to kick him down to the ground. Then he squeezed those tiny bare feet, almost clutching them to his chest.

  “Aaah! Wh-what are you doing, you perv?!”

  “Niko.” Not flinching at the blatant name-calling, Haruyuki put even more strength into his grip. What he really wanted was to hold her hand, but if he did that, it probably wouldn’t end just with her punching him.

  “Niko, you’re not wrong.”

  The moment Haruyuki gave voice to those words, Niko’s violent struggle to free her legs stopped. He stared right into her large eyes and continued earnestly.

  “It’s totally natural that you wouldn’t want the game to stop, that you’d want to stay in that world forever. But…I’ve played a ton of net games now, so I get it. There’s nothing sadder and lonelier than the ‘end’ of a game with no ending. Net games that stop making money because the users get bored and move on to some other game, there’s a quiet announcement that it’s shutting down, and then the servers get turned off and no one really even says anything about it. I’ve experienced the ‘middle’ of that moment countless times. I’ve watched the familiar old man at the weapons shop or the girl at the inn ‘die,’ smiling forever, and after I’ve linked out, back in my own room, I’ve cried countless times. That kind of ending is wrong. It’s completely wrong.”

  Not moving a muscle, feet still in the care of Haruyuki’s chest, Niko opened both eyes wide.

  Feeling the thin skin on the palms of his hands and the blood flowing beneath it, Haruyuki continued speaking, his voice slightly hoarse. “If…if there is an ending to Brain Burst, we should be trying to get there. Even if, say, we lose the ability to accelerate because of that, compared with the world just fizzling out pathetically, it’s way, way…It’s the right way.”

  Because that effort itself is probably the price we have to pay for all the things this game Brain Burst has given us. Because melancholy me being able to talk this long in my real-life voice with a girl I only recently met is probably thanks to the program.

  Hiding only this last thought in his heart, Haruyuki closed his mouth.

  Silence fell, and Niko stayed quiet for a long time, not moving a muscle.

  Aah! Did I say something totally nuts again?

  Just when Haruyuki was becoming utterly discouraged, the young King finally muttered grudgingly, “The right way, huh? So there actually are Burst Linkers who talk like that.”

  Eyes turned straight up at Haruyuki, Niko flashed him a smile, a bit like the one she gave him in angel mode. “You’re a weird one. To be honest, I was really wondering why the one and only flying ability would go to a lazy pudgeball like you, but…I kinda feel like I maybe get it a bit. But, that said…” Here the look on her face turned stormy, and Haruyuki stood up straighter. “Exactly how long are you gonna fool around with my feet, you perv? I’ll kill you!!”

  At the same time, her left foot shot out at the bridge of his nose, and Haruyuki fell helplessly backward.

  The sound of the door chime danced cheerfully over the thud of his body.

  “And then I ran into Master. Oh, here, treats. I nicked some we had at my place,” Takumu said, lifting what looked like a cake box, then tilting his head to the side after his gaze had made the return trip between Haruyuki sitting on the floor and rubbing his nose and Niko looking the other way on the sofa. “What are you doing?”

  “Perhaps they were fighting. No matter, no matter!” Kuroyukihime smiled faintly, hand on her uniformed hip, and Niko sniffed derisively.

  “Weeell. You know what they say, the more you fight, the closer you are.”

  Haruyuki hurriedly inserted himself between the two, certain to send sparks flying if left to themselves. “W-welcome, both of you! Thanks for the treats, Taku! So okay, let’s eat! I get the one with a strawberry on top!!”

  As he stood swiftly and headed toward the kitchen, two voices sounded off simultaneously behind him.

  “The strawberry’s for me!”

  “The strawberry’s mine!”

  “…Right.” He dipped his head grimly and prepared plates and tea.

  Fortunately, the box contained two pieces of strawberry shortcake and two of chocolate cake, so no further fighting was provoked—although there was the exchange: “You don’t have to have black cake, too?” “Chocolate isn’t black; it’s a burnt brown.” Once the four of them had concurrently taken their first bites of cake and sips of tea, the look on Kuroyukihime’s face changed.

  “Are you able to track Chrome Disaster?”

  At the question, Niko quickly ran her eyes over her virtual desktop and gave a slight nod. “Yeah. He should be moving pretty soon.”

  This steady reply made Haruyuki feel slightly uncomfortable.

  How was remote tracking of a Burst Linker even possible? You could tell a Burst Linker’s current position if the target started a duel and you dove into the field as a spectator, but Niko hadn’t had the look of accelerating. Or maybe the Legion Masters had some kind of crazy privileges that let them check in on the whereabouts of members in the real world?

  He opened his mouth to casually inquire along these lines.

  “There he is!” Niko shouted sharply, stabbing the almost circular strawberry she had set aside for last with a fork and tossing it in her mouth. “Cherry’s on a train on the Seibu Ikebukuro line. Given his pattern up to now, today’s hunting ground’s gonna be the Bukes.”

  “Ikebukuro? Annoying.” Kuroyukihime clicked her tongue lightly. She placed her fork on her now-empty plate with a clatter. “How will we move? Are we going to use a train, too, or a cab in the real? Or shall we cut through inside?”

  Unable to understand the meaning of her words, Haruyuki furrowed his brow.

  “Inside,” which was to say the duel field, had the appearance of continuing endlessly, but movement limit lines were set up along the borders. Without them, it would’ve been possible, as a battle strategy, to run desperately in a straight line until time ran out after landing a blow.

  So for example, diving from this place, from Haruyuki’s house into the field, the northern edge of Suginami Ward would be the farthest they could go; they definitely shouldn’t have been able to get all the way to Ikebukuro in Toshima Ward.

  However, Niko answered readily after only a moment’s thought. “We’ll go from inside. With this setup, we shouldn’t get tripped up by any Enemies.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Kuroyukihime assented, looking severe.

  No longer knowing which way was even up, Haruyuki was caught by Kuroyukihime’s serious gaze head-on.

  “Now, then. Haruyuki. I’ll teach you the command to dive into the true battlefield of the Burst Linkers. It will use ten of your burst points, but that’s not a problem, is it?”

  “N-no, not if it’s only ten points. But more important…the true battlefield…?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like. The true nature of what we call the Accelerated World is there. Shout the command after me, just like I say it. Here we go. Fifth Chrome Disaster Subjugation, mission start!”

  There, she took a deep breath, straightened her back, and—

  As she touched the button to connect her Neurolinker to the global net, the jet-black, beautiful princess shouted in a commanding voice, “Unlimited burst!”

  5

  “Unlimited burst!”

  At the same time he shouted, lost in himself, an acceleration noise twice as
loud as normal slammed Haruyuki’s consciousness. His vision blacked out momentarily.

  But a silver light soon cut through the darkness: the effect light transforming his entire body into metallic steel.

  In normal acceleration—with the “burst link” command—he would first become his pink pig avatar, but that phase was skipped here, and Haruyuki transformed directly into his pure silver duel avatar, Silver Crow.

  The surrounding darkness was then blown away by a rainbow-colored light. From the other side of the radiating aura, there appeared the glittering of blue-black steel.

  The place that should have been his living room had been metamorphosed into a cold, metallic corridor, almost like the castle of the king of hell in some fantasy film. The windows that opened to the south had disappeared, and several light blue flames flickered on walls and pillars sporting the design of several steel plates pulled together in the shape of radiating fins. A thick fog coiled around his feet, and the high ceiling was sunken in darkness, leaving him unable to really make it out.

  The leaden place closely resembled a purgatory stage, but there was absolutely nothing organic about it. Haruyuki briefly surveyed that cold and linear scene that extended as far as the eye could see.

  Reducing his focus, he saw three duel avatars standing very close to him:

  Cyan Pile, dark blue armor on sturdy limbs, right hand equipped with its enormous Pile Driver.

  Scarlet Rain, a lone handgun hanging from her slender, crimson-red frame.

  And Black Lotus, shrouded in semitransparent, pure black armor, her four sharp, sword-shaped limbs glittering.

  Haruyuki secretly swallowed back the feelings of inferiority welling up in him standing alongside Cyan Pile—Takumu, who was the same level as him—much less the two Kings, as he muttered, “This is the Unlimited Neutral Field…”

  “It is,” Kuroyukihime affirmed in a voice distorted by a metallic effect as she turned around lightly. The tips of her toes essentially sharp sword points, Black Lotus did not walk normally, but rather hovered slightly above the floor.

  Raising her right hand, the same elongated blade shape as her legs, Kuroyukihime indicated the end of the corridor. “That’s likely the exit. It would be faster to actually look.”

  “Yeah. Let’s go.” Scarlet Rain—Niko—nodded, making her antennae-like pigtails bounce.

  After walking a minute or so, an external white light started to shine in their path along the steel passageway, sinking into the heavy fog. Unconsciously quickening his pace, Haruyuki overtook the other three, cut around the bend to the left, and stared.

  The place that had originally been the eastern wall facing the main street had changed into an open terrace, the entire area opened up to the outside. Their current location was still at a height equivalent to the twenty-third floor of his building, so the terrace offered an unbroken view of the outside world.

  Tremendous. There was no other word.

  In the sky, piles of thick gray clouds twisted, bluish-purple lightning frequently piercing the gaps between them. On the ground, like Haruyuki’s condo, the buildings were covered in a design of layered, sharp steel plates. The heart of Shinjuku, faint and hazy directly ahead of him, was now more jostling strongholds of evil armies than a group of skyscrapers. No matter how much he rubbed his eyes, he saw nothing moving. It was absolutely deserted.

  The words “city of evil” lingering in the back of his mind, Haruyuki whispered to Kuroyukihime advancing to his side, “I’ve never seen a field like this before. What are its attributes…?”

  “Chaos.” After giving this brief response, she turned eyes glowing violet toward Haruyuki and added, “You’ll understand what that means sooner or later. Anyway, Haruyuki. It’s all well and good to take in the view, but there’s something else you should have noticed first.”

  “Huh…?” Haruyuki hurriedly swiveled his head through his surroundings before finally spotting what should have been the focus of his attention.

  In the duel fields he’d visited up to now, his own and his enemy’s HP bars had always appeared in a fixed location in an upper portion of his field of vision, separated by a timer that started at 1,800 seconds and counted down the time remaining. Now, however, the only HP bar was his, and there was no sign of the count numbers.

  Although the technical aspects of Brain Burst were the ultimate of the game apps Haruyuki had used so far, feeding back to players fields so detailed and apparently tangible to the senses that they were indistinguishable from actual sensory input, the game itself was the ancient and hoary one-on-one fighter. Despite the fact that the image before him had changed only slightly when he came to the Unlimited Neutral Field, it made him feel like the game had suddenly gotten a face-lift into a cutting-edge, large-scale net game, and Haruyuki shouted involuntarily, “Th-the time remaining’s gone?! What’s going on…?”

  “That’s what going on.” It was Niko to his left who replied. “There’s no upper time limit for dives set here. That’s why it’s ‘Unlimited.’”

  “What?!” At a loss for words yet again, Haruyuki considered seriously the implications of what he had just heard. “Uh, um. We are accelerated, right?”

  “Yes, of course.” Kuroyukihime’s response set his thoughts whirling full speed again.

  Brain Burst accelerated the consciousness of its users a thousand times and caused a full dive into a virtual field. So even if you used the full thirty minutes that was the usual upper limit for acceleration, a mere 1.8 seconds passed in the real world.

  However, without that upper limit…

  Spending just ten real-world minutes in this Unlimited Neutral Field, that would end up being ten thousand minutes—i.e., about 160 hours, i.e., about seven days. And if that was the case, what about spending the equivalent of a full day in the real world in this field?

  After counting on his fingers, Haruyuki muttered in a hoarse voice, “Th-three years…”

  What did that even mean? That was basically an eternity. Which meant, if you used this “unlimited burst,” no matter how much homework you had piled up, no matter how much you skipped out on studying for exams—

  “You’d be better off giving up on that, Haru,” Takumu said from behind him, as if perfectly sussing out Haruyuki’s miscreant thoughts.

  When he turned around, his friend shrugged the solid shoulders of his avatar and continued in a voice sporting a laugh, “I came here exactly once before. I got excited that time just like you. I even thought going home right away would be a waste. I mean, I had spent those ten burst points, so I just hung around for three days, inside time. When I got back to the real world, I had forgotten everything I was planning to do right before I accelerated. It totally sucked.”

  “That’s right, Haruyuki. In just three days, you’ll simply forget what you were going to do, but if you spend, say, a month or six months here…” Kuroyukihime’s tone grew serious. “People are changed when they return. It’s only natural; in the worst-case scenario, the you you were and the soul you have are different ages. If you don’t want your family and friends eyeing you suspiciously, you should avoid coming here too often.”

  The moment he heard that admonishment, a voice revived in the back of Haruyuki’s brain.

  If you knew exactly how much time me and that girl there had spent in the Accelerated World up to now…

  The words Niko had said smilingly the day before. So what made it meaningful was—

  But before he could pursue that thought, the girl herself patted his shoulder lightly. “Anyway, let’s get moving already. Although we do have time to spare. When we accelerated, there were still two minutes real time before the train Cherry’s on gets to Ikebukuro.”

  “R-right. So, moving…you mean, to Ikebukuro?”

  Two minutes in the real world was more than thirty-three hours in the Accelerated World. Thinking that this was rather more than “time to spare,” Haruyuki turned his gaze to the northeast.

  On the far side of the blue-b
lack steel city that seemed to stretch on to infinity, he could make out an enormous structure dimly rising. If that was the massive shopping center Sunshine City in Ikebukuro, then the distance from here to there should have been the same as it was in the real world, six kilometers.

  “Umm. Are we walking? Or running? Or?”

  “Why would we do that? Why do you think you’re here?”

  “Huh? What…”

  The adorable crimson duel avatar at the other end of Haruyuki’s dumbfounded gaze clasped both hands tightly in front of her chest and tilted her head to one side.

  “You’ll give us a big hug and carry us, right, big brother?”

  After using Punch and Kick to destroy the obstacles—strangely shaped statues and iron lattices set on the open terrace—and building his special-attack gauge up to the maximum, Haruyuki turned around, muttering, “Let’s see.”

  He saw the two Kings shoot dangerous looks at each other.

  “I have no choice but to be held, not with these arms. You hang from Silver Crow’s legs.”

  “You gotta be kidding! Why would I do something as humiliating as that? Your design’s the problem here. Take the train by yourself!”

  Takumu pushed in between the two squaring off with each other and sending actual, not just metaphorical, sparks flying and sighed. “Okay, how about we do it like this? Master, Haru holds you with his right arm and the Red King with his left. And then I’ll hang from his legs. Can you do that, Haru?”

  “Oh. Y-yeah, prob’ly. Although I probably won’t be able to go too fast.”

  Stepping out in front of Niko and Kuroyukihime still looking dissatisfied, Haruyuki stretched out his right hand first.

  “E-excuse me.” He got a firm hold on the slim waist above Black Lotus’s armor skirt with its black lotus flower design and then wrapped his left arm around Scarlet Rain’s even more slender torso.

  Without a scrap of mental energy to spare on the excitement of having flowers in both arms, Haruyuki nervously focused his power in his shoulder blades and deployed the metal fins folded up on his back.