No, he wasn’t—he could see a violet light blinking faintly in the depths of the goggles of the ink black form, like a very distant, fixed star. It pulsed—throb, throb—with a weak flicker that made him think of the glowing ember of a soul.
“Kuro…yu…,” Haruyuki whispered.
Bzz!
A strong vibration detonated. It was the sound of two eyes glittering fiercely beneath those goggles.
A light of the same color filled the crease lines of the semitransparent armor from head to toe, like carved onyx. As it did, the dust covering her body blew away, restoring a fresh reflective sheen. Finally, the swords of her arms and legs chimed loudly.
Haruyuki could only stare, lump in his throat, at the jet-black avatar rising, as if gently pulled by an invisible thread. Standing straight, Black Lotus flicked the tips of her legs, floating slightly above the ground, and started moving in a leisurely hover. Still gripped by the electric shocks and lying on his side, she drew close to Silver Crow and stopped abruptly.
“Haruyuki.” Her voice was the usual, gentle and severe.
“Yes,” Haruyuki replied, suppressing a sob, and she started murmuring with her familiar, bitter smile.
“Look. The way you spoke before, it was almost as if Rider and I had been in love, yes?”
“Y-you weren’t?”
“We absolutely were not. I told you, you’re the first. And…don’t just keep rolling around. Thrust a hand into the ground.”
“Huh?…O-okay.”
Haruyuki did as he was told and brought together his sharp fingertips, thrusting them into the dry earth before him. The instant he did, he could feel the sparks binding his body seep quickly into the ground, and he cried out, “O-of course! Earth…”
“If you think about the technique affinity and characteristics, you should be able to handle them even on a first encounter. It seems I still have a lot to teach you.”
He heard a pathetic sniffle from behind, and Haruyuki turned his face back to see the electricity-generating avatar gradually retreating, white smoke rising up from the transformer on its back.
“You can handle the rest, yes? I’m going to go look after the little girl who got caught in a trap.” She had barely even finished the nonchalant remark when the sky boomed and her raven-like avatar disappeared.
A dash with absolutely no preparation, so swift it was terrifying. Kuroyukihime, plunging ahead several dozen meters like a beam of darkness, appeared the next instant beside the enemy’s close-combat leader, striking a pose on top of Niko.
“Whoa!” A startled cry slipping out, the enemy avatar abandoned the red artillery he’d been holding, unfurled hands with abnormally tough fingers, and danced toward Kuroyukihime. Just from the fact that it had ripped Niko’s main armament off through brute strength alone, it was likely not a pugilist type, but rather a grappling-technique duel avatar.
Despite this, Kuroyukihime inexplicably stuck her right arm straight out, practically asking to be grabbed. The enemy’s eyes blazed fiercely, and arms struck out like snakes to take hold of Black Lotus’s arm in two places.
“Gotcha! One Way Thr—” Shouting the technique as it angled its body around, the avatar hoisted the captive arm against its right shoulder and took on a posture for a one-armed throw.
And with that motion, something spilled down, falling in pieces.
Ten thick, curved cylinders: Fingers. The fingers the enemy used to clench the swords that were Kuroyukihime’s arms were severed against the blades by virtue of their own strength.
“Sorry, but grappling techniques basically have no effect on me,” she said to the frozen enemy as she started bearing down, arching the arm still braced against the avatar’s shoulder in a downward diagonal.
A thin ray of light escaped from the right shoulder to the left flank. From there, the enemy avatar’s muscular torso slid smoothly away and dropped to the ground, leaving 70 percent of its body behind.
“Ah! Ga—Gaaaaaah!!” Although it apparently still had HP since it didn’t disappear, given its situation, disappearing would no doubt have been preferable.
No longer interested in the enemy shrieking at the pain of having been bisected and bouncing around on the ground with its remaining arm, Kuroyukihime glared in turn at the seven or eight close-range combatants still surrounding her.
“It’s nothing personal, but anyone who engages me must inevitably experience amputation.” Her tone was calm, but its violent undertones made everyone on the battlefield hold their breath.
“So…don’t go telling me now you don’t want it!” she called out sonorously, and she leapt to attack the first unfortunate avatar like a bird of prey. The high-pitched sound of metal endlessly screeching and the desperate, angry voices of the surrounding Burst Linkers immediately filled the air.
Deciding that she would be fine if he left her to that for the time being, Haruyuki turned again toward the electricity-generating avatar that still had him ensnared in its wires.
The instant their eyes met, the enemy reared back. His face resembled an old gauge, and he held a single hand out. “Hey, hold on. The battery’s recharging now—”
“As if I’m going to wait!!” Haruyuki yelled, grabbing the two wires tied to his ankles with both hands and pulling before kicking off the earth and ascending in one fluid motion.
“Aaah!”
He gained altitude, still dangling the struggling enemy, and started turning in circles while hovering.
“Wah! Aah! Aaah!”
After adding sufficient centrifugal force to his opponent so that its prolonged scream rose and fell with the doppler effect, Haruyuki released the wires. The bulky robotic avatar flew toward the south with incredible force, and a small crash echoed somewhere amidst a group of buildings there.
Somewhat dizzy himself, Haruyuki shook his head hard before looking down and gazing in wonder at the aspect of the battle unfolding. Perhaps it would have been more accurate at that point to call it a “massacre” rather than a “duel.”
The blue close-range avatars mostly fought with their own fists and feet, or hand-to-hand weapons like swords and hammers. So if two blue avatars went up against each other, the basic strategy would be to exchange attacks and guard while aiming for any gaps that appeared in their opponent’s defenses.
But although Kuroyukihime—Black Lotus—was at first glance an extremely close-range type, given that her limbs were actual swords, every single motion was an attack.
Obviously, this included purposeful action like cutting and thrusting, but if an opponent’s fist caught her arm, that fist was severed, and the movement of her legs could shred her opponent if she simply chased them down. She brooked no contact at all; everything that touched her was dissected—she was, without doubt, the water lily of black death.
Her figure, fighting as if dancing, was absurdly beautiful and so cold it was almost sad.
In the span of a mere minute or two, the majority of the enemy’s infantry had either been annihilated or rendered helpless by the intense pain of severed limbs that left them rolling around on the ground.
“Aauuugh!!” The enormous Burst Linker that was the last of the close-range types howled thickly, abruptly. Brandishing a long sword with a fat blade over its head, it moved to strike Kuroyukihime headlong.
Its speed and timing were impressive. Unable to avoid the blade, a steel-colored bolt of lightning thundering down—Kuroyukihime stopped it on the intersecting swords of her arms.
Skreeee!
A high-frequency, ear-piercing screech rang out. Dazzling sparks flew from the point of contact, and movement on both sides stopped. Followed by successive, high-pitched metallic creaks. The silver and black swords increased the depths at which they bit into each other with each second.
Haruyuki couldn’t determine in that moment which carved into which. But the warrior avatar with the sword contorted its grinning, demonic mask into a sneer.
“Ha!” The warrior’s low voice cried out at
the same instant that Kuroyukihime’s arms, directly beneath his sword, disengaged themselves and immediately sliced out to the sides.
Falling soundlessly were the warrior avatar’s head and the top half of the enormous sword. Kuroyukihime ruthlessly pierced the head tumbling to the ground with the tip of her left leg, its eyes still wide-open, as if unable to comprehend what was happening. A pillar of light soared up, and the enemy avatar shattered like glasswork and disappeared.
Once again, a few seconds of silence.
Breaking that silence came a short voice issuing from the distant edge of the crater. “Why?”
In a tone so flat it made Haruyuki wonder if he had finally lost the composure that had kept him going up to now, the Yellow King whined, as if moaning, “Why do you appear now and obstruct the circus carnival I’ve been preparing all these years? After curling up and hiding in some little hole somewhere for two years, why?”
The upturned eyes carved into the clown’s laughing face filled with a white phosphorescence. He spread arms like dead twigs out to his sides, jumped up onto one leg, and shook his head from left to right. Suddenly from beneath the mask, there slipped the short, staccato beats of laughter. The Yellow King pointed accusingly at Kuroyukihime with his right hand, muttering in a voice swiftly regaining its derisive color.
“Does this mean you’ve already forgotten? The friend of ours you betrayed and beheaded? I wonder where he is and what he’s doing now. I don’t suppose he’s dwelling on the fact that he can never return to the Accelerated World…or the certain someone responsible for that, hmm? I, for one, certainly cannot forget it. A straightforward duel is one thing, but that sort of surprise attack…Hmm?”
Listening to the sneering, throaty chuckle, Haruyuki screamed in his heart. You can’t listen to him. He’s just trying to incapacitate you again.
However, Haruyuki couldn’t bring himself to actually utter the words. He could see that these two—the Black King and the Yellow King—shared a history that no one could come between, a history training together since the early days of the Accelerated World and of friendship until the incident two years before.
Haruyuki descended gently and stood directly behind the half-demolished, silent Scarlet Rain and Black Lotus standing next to her. He prayed fervently, somewhere deep inside, that they not lose.
Suddenly, Kuroyukihime’s right arm came up without a sound. She turned its obsidian edge, unblemished by even a single scratch despite the fierce battle, straight at the Yellow King. “You’ve got one thing wrong, Yellow Radio,” the Black King declared, her voice crystalline and clear.
“Oh? And what’s that? You can’t possibly mean to say that that wasn’t a cowardly ambush?”
“No. That you think your head carries the same weight for me as Red Rider’s. Shall I tell you something else? You see, I…” Kuroyukihime brandished her right arm to the side with a clink and said, “I have hated you from the very moment we first met!”
The Yellow King threw his upper body back with a start.
Kuroyukihime glanced back quickly and yelled, “Rain, your remaining weapons have finished charging, yes?! Crow, protect her!! I’m going!!”
She set off a savage dash, carving a rut into the bottom of the crater.
“Hey! Rest a little longer!”
It was Niko who cursed at her. She made her remaining weapon—the right-hand one—and the half-destroyed missile pods click into place and pointed them at what was left of the enemy’s long-range battalion, which was arrayed on the edge of the crater.
Neither had Haruyuki just been standing idly and listening to the exchange between Kuroyukihime and Yellow Radio. Taking advantage of the dozen seconds of cease-fire, he’d been looking for something: the enemy’s midrange avatar that was the source of the signal for the jamming attack.
There! Haruyuki’s heart cried when he spotted a yellow type on the northern face of the crater, lurking behind a red type as if hiding. The pods mounted on either of its shoulders were deployed, and a light effect of concentric circles was being generated from the parabolic antenna protruding from the center.
No sooner had he spied this figure, which practically screamed radio attack in progress, than Haruyuki was springboarding off the ground.
However, it was a full thirty meters from the center of the crater to its outer edge. No matter how speedy Silver Crow might have been, he wouldn’t be able to cover that distance in an instant; there’d be just enough time for the big gun of the red bodyguard to get him in its sights.
Something chillingly cold ran up Haruyuki’s spine. He was being targeted by a gun on an open plane with no cover. This was the exact scenario responsible for his winning slump these last few months.
He would just have to dodge it. If he didn’t take down that jamming avatar, Niko’s firepower would stay locked up. In which case, the gunfire of the red avatars still going strong in the enemy array would focus on Kuroyukihime, necessarily impeding her showdown with the Yellow King.
The tide of this battle likely hinged with whether or not Haruyuki could dodge this one bullet.
His hands and feet chilled to numbness at this overwhelming pressure. His vision narrowed, and only the darkness of the gun barrel grew larger. It was hopeless. There was no way he could dodge in this situation. In the stillness of his virtual training room, he could only barely avoid the projectile 30 percent of the time.
No. This situation is different from that white room.
Because this gun was attached to the avatar holding it. A sniper-type duel avatar, large-lensed eyes glittering on a brown, camouflage-patterned body. Instead of the gun, he should watch the guy. He should watch for a sign telegraphing the pull of the trigger.
Instantly, everything but the enemy avatar disappeared from Haruyuki’s field of view. He forgot even the battlefield, his wide eyes capturing only the figure of his opponent readying its rifle.
The back of the enemy’s neck stiffened abruptly, its right shoulder went up a few millimeters, and its right arm shook—
Here it comes!
—and its right finger squeezed the trigger, the muzzle flickering white.
By that time, his body was already twisting, barreling left.
The air whizzed past his ears, and the heat beam skimmed his chest and right shoulder before flowing off behind him. Ignoring the gouge of scorching heat, Haruyuki plunged ahead the final ten meters, slipped close past the side of the enemy sniper, and sprang at the midrange type behind it.
With hands flat, he chopped at the antennas stationed on the shoulders of the radio-wave avatar, who looked profoundly stunned. The moment the delicate device was smashed, Haruyuki crouched, only to fly straight up.
Niko!!
He wasn’t certain whether or not this shout in his mind reached her, but the instant the jamming ceased, Scarlet Rain’s remaining weapons fired all at once.
Assailants on her right flank were mowed down by the heat beam of her main cannon, and missiles rained down on her left, launching a curtain of flames as if tracing the outer edge of the crater. Naturally, the enemy army was not completely destroyed with this one volley, but the long-distance attacks that had been targeting Black Lotus and fired at random dropped en masse into silence.
The sound of explosions died down, but the quiet that was briefly born was pierced by a howl, a raging fire from Kuroyukihime.
“Radio!!”
The sword of her right arm drew a black arc. Split soundlessly in two, dancing in the air, was the right corner of Yellow Radio’s enormous hat.
“Lotus!!” the Yellow King answered back angrily in a voice lacking even the slightest hint of the teasing lilt it had held up to that point. He offered a counterblow with a long, large, baton-shaped weapon he had produced from somewhere. With her left arm-sword, Kuroyukihime knocked aside the thrust launched at her, drawing out a yellow line. The sparks that flew lit up the pair brilliantly.
Haruyuki landed on the stabilizer extending prominently from Ni
ko’s back, the Red King continuing to launch intermittent cover fire, and he stared, half-stunned, at the fierce fight beginning on the western end of the crater.
It went without saying that this was the first fight between Kings—level-nine Burst Linkers—he had seen.
It was likely that could have been said about anyone there—including the two participants themselves.
The current Kings of Pure Color, except for Niko, had reached level nine at basically the same time two and some years earlier. They had then learned of the harsh sudden-death rule to advance to level ten and had held a roundtable meeting to avoid fighting to the death.
At that meeting, Black King Black Lotus had killed the first Red King, Red Rider, with a surprise critical hit. That was the first and last time a King had defeated a King. The Black King, hunted ever since as a traitor, had hidden herself for two years in the Umesato local net, and the other Kings had concluded a mutual nonaggression pact and no longer ventured out of their respective territories.
Which is why this was the first time since the founding of the Accelerated World that two level nines had crossed blades in so natural a duel.
Haruyuki. And Niko. And the dozen or so remaining Yellow Legion members who had at some point stopped their attacks, held their breath, and watched the tide of the fight.
They’re so fast! Haruyuki let a sigh of admiration slip out in his heart.
If he didn’t concentrate, all he could see were mysterious bolts of lightning popping off in succession in the area where the pair faced off. The Black King slashed out four, five times in a row; the Yellow King admirably stopped the blows with his baton, twirling in a frenzy; and then he kicked out a long leg, not missing the slight opening she left. Each time Kuroyukihime blocked one of these Kicks with her leg, shock waves spread out like ripples on the water and distorted the background.
Perhaps because of these successive and incredibly high-powered attacks, cracks started to radiate out from beneath the feet of both fighters, and pieces of rubble began flying. As the air filled with a colorless pressure, the light emitted by their armor seemed to increase in strength.