“…Nearly there,” Niko muttered, and Haruyuki replied reflexively with a question.
“Wh-where?”
“Their special-attack gauges should be just about full. The real show starts now.”
Before the last word had faded from his ears, a remarkable crash exploded, and both fighters moved away from each other, as if propelled by it.
Instead of springing back into the fight, Kuroyukihime leisurely lowered her hips and set her left arm sideways in front of her body, notching the sword of her right arm perpendicularly at the peak of the first. A pulsing violet light engulfed the long blade in tandem with a low-frequency vibration shaking the air.
Facing her, Yellow Radio crossed both arms in front of his body and inserted the yellow baton between his fingertips. The spheres attached to either end of the wand also emitted a cyclic light.
Haruyuki felt the rapidly increasing pressure touch his cheek, as if it were shooting out in bits and pieces. He had witnessed a glimpse of the power of a King’s special attack during his duel with Niko. The enormous beam that shot out from one of her main weapons had casually blown the uppermost part of the Shinjuku Government Office onto the other side of the duel field.
What would happen if you got hit by an attack with that level of potential at such close range?
“…It’s not power that decides this. It’s speed.” Niko’s murmuring reached Haruyuki’s ears again as he kept his eyes wide-open and forgot to breathe.
“Huh? Wh-what do you mean?”
“No matter how you slice it, Lotus’s special attack is direct. Against that, Radio’s prob’ly got a hallucination. Which means the whole thing hangs on whether or not Lotus can deliver her blow before Radio’s attack is effective.”
Haruyuki gulped hard.
The steeply inclined sun dropped a single ray of red light through a gap in black clouds, red light that glinted off the obsidian sword.
Black Lotus called in a clear voice, “Death by Pier—”
At the same time, Yellow Radio shouted, “Futile Fortune Wa—”
However…
The two voices, simultaneously calling out their two attacks, failed to utter their final syllables.
Thuk.
This dry sound, quite small and yet carrying an overwhelming presence, silenced the voices of the two Kings.
It was the sound of something piercing the vibrant yellow chest armor of Yellow Radio from behind.
Kuroyukihime halted her attack midway. Haruyuki, Niko, the other Burst Linkers, and the Yellow King himself all simply stared at the silver-gray metal protruding neatly from the armor and extending out about fifteen centimeters.
7
“Wh-who is—?” Haruyuki croaked in something that couldn’t rightly be called a voice.
Approaching the hypervigilant Yellow King from behind unnoticed, and on top of that piercing his armor like it was made of paper, without even using a special attack. But even more importantly, who on earth would think to jump into a direct clash between Kings?
Almost as if it had heard Haruyuki speak, a shadow oozed out from behind the Yellow King. A dark gray silhouette essentially assimilating every nightfall everywhere. The instant the faintest afterglow caressed its surface, it shone as if the reflected light were leaking out.
The entire body of the mysterious intruder was wrapped in blackened silver armor with a mirrored surface. Although this aspect did bear some resemblance to Silver Crow, the figure was completely different. Heavyweight like a knight from the Middle Ages, voluminous shoulders, chest, elbows. Its right hand, wrapped in an enormous gauntlet, held a double-edged sword that looked nearly as long as its owner was tall, the tip of which, tapering off into essentially nothing, lanced the Yellow King from behind.
What drew the eye even more sharply than this sword was the knight’s head.
It wore a hood-shaped helmet with long horns, stretching toward the back from both sides. However, in the place where there usually should have been some type of face, there was nothing. Given the angle of the sun, the interior of the hood should have been illuminated, and yet it was simply painted a lone black, looking very like the darkness itself had taken on physical form and was lurking there. If Haruyuki really, really strained his eyes, he could see some kind of pitch-black something wriggling on the surface like a living creature.
A blackened silver knight with a mask of darkness.
Immediately before its name slid from Niko’s mouth at his feet, Haruyuki made the same connection. That was probably…It had to be—
“The Armor of Catastrophe. Chrome Disaster.” After these hoarse words, Niko continued in a whisper, “How? It’s too soon. We should have had an entire day to spare.”
Haruyuki soon guessed the reason for her shock. They had dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field two minutes before the train carrying Chrome Disaster’s real self, the Red Legion’s level-six Burst Linker Cherry Rook, would arrive in Ikebukuro. Since time here flowed one thousand times faster than in the real world, those two minutes were equivalent to thirty-three hours.
There was only one answer. Cherry Rook, the resident of that armor, had accelerated while still on the train and appeared in this world.
This was understandable in a Normal Duel, which lasted at most 1.8 seconds in the real. But they were in a higher-order world that could not be escaped once a player dived in, unless they made it to a withdrawal point. Leaving your real-life body behind pressed up against other people in the train, on public transport no less, was an act that surpassed daring and went right into recklessness.
“Cherry…are you so crazed now you can’t even hold on for two minutes?” Niko murmured in a stifled voice.
However, Haruyuki couldn’t read that kind of insanity in the Fifth Chrome Disaster, standing on the western edge of the crater.
His physique was not particularly powerful. Just barely 170 centimeters and much smaller than the Fourth Chrome Disaster they had seen in the replay file Kuroyukihime had showed them the previous day. Its form was an orthodox human shape. It stood quietly, almost vacantly, still gripping the sword piercing the Yellow King but doing nothing more.
Why didn’t the Yellow King break free? Why did he just stare silently at Chrome Disaster, his face turned as far to the rear as it could go?
A second later, Haruyuki got his answer.
“Yuroooooo!” A strange scream abruptly gushed forth. It was neither a human voice nor a beast’s. Not an alarm. It was an alien howl the likes of which he had never heard before.
Its source was the darkness lurking on the knight’s face. A darkness with actual substance erupted together with this cry from beneath the tossed-back hood of the helmet, immediately solidifying into a particular shape: a row of sharp triangles biting into each other, above and below the hood. Fangs. Inky black fangs protruded from the edge of the hood, almost as if the entirety of the cowl made up a mouth.
With a wet sound, the “mouth” opened.
In the rich darkness of the interior, two small, perfectly round eyes shone a faint red.
The instant he saw this, Yellow Radio finally snapped into motion. More throwing than reaching both hands around his back, he grabbed the sword piercing him and tried to pull it out.
He hadn’t moved sooner because he’d been frozen. Constricted with terror.
Even Kuroyukihime, a short distance away, remained silent, still striking her pose. She didn’t have the look of fear to her, but Haruyuki could sense a faint hesitation. Although it was a chance for her to attack, this wasn’t the kind of situation that facilitated quick decisions about which one of the avatars to target.
Chrome Disaster, the Armor of Catastrophe, brought the Yellow King, struggling to break free of the sword, to his enormous mouth, almost like a piece of food stabbed with a fork. As the jaw, opening even farther, drew nearer the round, puffy shoulder of the clown avatar, a clear, viscous liquid hung from its fangs.
“Deceit Firecracker!!” Yellow Radio crie
d out in a high voice, on the verge of having his shoulder eaten.
In a puff of vile yellow smoke, the skewered avatar exploded and disappeared.
Self-destruction?! Haruyuki opened his eyes wide, but he soon saw the same yellow smoke rise up about five meters away with the clown flying out from inside the cloud. It was probably a special attack of the glamour/escape type.
Fine sparks scattering from the razor-edged hole in his chest armor, the Yellow King back dashed another several meters. After ordering his subordinate avatars to draw near, he finally spoke.
“Pathetic dog, have you forgotten your master and now you’re here to get in the way of the program? Well, fine. If you’re as hungry as all that, go ahead and eat Blackie there in front of you! Although it’s not a color that stimulates the appetite, is it?! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” He laughed, but in his voice was a tension he didn’t try to hide.
Opening and closing his black maw with a clang, Chrome Disaster looked in turn at the Black King and the Yellow King, each standing an equal distance away. There was nothing remotely like a player struggling to decide who to fight in this gesture.
This was the look of a creature assessing which prey to attack.
That face which was not a face casually turned toward the bottom of the crater. Its gaze rested momentarily on the Red King, silent and covered in wounds, but it showed no sign of emotion even at the sight of its own Legion Master. It turned its face up at Haruyuki, standing atop the stabilizer on her back.
Suddenly.
He felt like the strange voice was delivered directly to the core of his brain. Inflectionless, like an animal—or a machine.
Get eaten.
Be eaten, be meat.
What was more terrifying than anything else was that the tone of the voice itself was most certainly that of a boy the same age as he was, before his voice changed. Haruyuki felt a species of dread run up his spine, one he had never before felt in the Accelerated World.
Setting aside the alien nature of the acceleration technology, Brain Burst was at most a fighting game. The fighting that had taken place up to that point in the South Ikebukuro crater had been extremely gruesome, but still, it didn’t fall outside of the sphere of gaming, albeit just barely.
It was true that if the Yellow King’s ambush had succeeded and he had managed to hunt Niko or Kuroyukihime, the two of them would have had Brain Burst forcefully uninstalled, and they would never again have experienced the pleasure of visiting the Accelerated World. But that would have been the end of the game, and their everyday lives in the real world would have continued on after that.
If the voice just now indeed belonged to the Burst Linker called Chrome Disaster, then inside that blackened silver armor, the boy by the name of Cherry Rook, the player supposedly enjoying this game, no longer existed.
Kuroyukihime said that Enhanced Armament encroached on the mind of its user. Haruyuki half believed and half doubted that, but the fact that the humanity of the person wrapped in the armor had already been largely lost was clearly communicated by that short utterance. And that phenomenon was likely not limited to the Accelerated World. Whoever was inside that armor couldn’t possibly be living peacefully in the real world.
“Niko…he’s already—”
“Don’t say it.” The Red King astutely guessed the meaning conveyed by Haruyuki’s quavering tone. “We…we might still be in time. If we can destroy the armor here and now, then maybe—” She didn’t finish her whisper.
“Ruuooo…Oooooooh!!” Chrome Disaster howled ferociously again, as if to destroy the hope Niko expressed. Changing direction abruptly, he faced the Yellow King.
He brought the large sword in his right hand up to his shoulder and stretched out his left in front of him, five fingers in the shape of enormous claws.
And then something surprising happened. Despite the fact that the Armor voiced no attack name, one of the red avatars gathered very close to the Yellow King was sucked into Chrome Disaster’s left hand at an alarming speed. The Armor fingers bit into the torso of the unfortunate duel avatar with a metallic clang.
“Eeaah!”
Even as a high-pitched scream escaped its throat, the red type tried to turn the rifle in its right hand toward the Armor’s head. Haruyuki realized abruptly that it was the long-distance type who had been protecting the jamming avatar.
The muzzle of the rifle glittered, and a bluish-white beam was very nearly discharged at point-blank range. But just as this was about to happen, the right arm gripping the gun was ripped off at the base. The beam grazed Chrome Disaster’s helmet and streamed off in vain to the rear. Haruyuki hadn’t even been able to see the slash that took off the arm.
And then, “Rooooo!!” In tandem with this cry, Chrome Disaster opened wide the fangs lining his hood. With a chomp, the red avatar’s right shoulder was swallowed up, lost to the darkness of the maw.
“Aauuuuughn!!” The wail of distress that burst forth was so brutal it made Haruyuki want to cover his ears. The pain of damage in the Unlimited Neutral Field was twice that of the lower field. Most likely, this red type was now experiencing the same level of pain his body would in the real world: that of being devoured by a wild animal.
The dozens of enormous teeth easily pierced the avatar’s armor. A semicircle was ripped off from shoulder to chest, and the severed left arm dropped to the ground.
“Aaaaaaaaaah!!” The head of the avatar flailed at the intense anguish of having its stomach gouged out and losing both arms.
Finished chewing and opening wide again, Chrome Disaster’s “mouth” then swallowed the flailing head whole.
Was the scattered spray accompanying the wet squishing a spark effect, or fragments of armor—or the avatar’s flesh?
The screaming abruptly ceased. A few seconds later, the remains of the avatar, having lost its entire head and been drained of all strength, finally melted into a pillar of light and disintegrated.
My vision is crazy wobbly, Haruyuki thought. It took him a brief while to realize the reason for that was his knees were shaking so hard that they were knocking together.
That was not a duel.
It wasn’t violence, either, nor slaughter.
It was predation. Simply an instinctive behavior, to take in the flesh and blood of the captured avatar along with their burst points.
At the same time as the up-and-down movement of the black fangs stopped, Haruyuki saw a deep red light running along the seams of the blackened silver armor. A phenomenon akin to stolen points, but also some kind of energy as well. Most likely, it was Drain, the health gauge absorption ability Kuroyukihime had mentioned the day before.
“Rooooo!” Chrome Disaster raised his head and howled from deep in his throat.
“You mad dog…It appears I have no choice. It is regrettable, but the program is canceled. Everyone, get to the leave point in Ikebukuro Station and retreat!!” the Yellow King shouted. As the order was given, the dozen or so remaining Yellow Legion members faded to semitransparency, apparently using some kind of special move.
The avatars, now hazy shadows, evacuated the crater with remarkable haste and retreated to the northwest. Although it was already clear that his plan had been ruined, the voice of the receding Yellow King drifted back to the field in a final sneer.
“Heh-heh-heh! Red and Black, I’ll invite you back to our wonderful, delightful carnival one day! That is, if you still have the will to fight after being eaten by this dog! Heh-heh-heh…Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Had they assessed the situation calmly, they could’ve adopted a strategy of interfering with this retreat: get Chrome Disaster to attack them and then take the head of the Yellow King. But Haruyuki couldn’t move a single finger, much less say anything. It was all he could do to simply stand atop Scarlet Rain’s armor plate, cowering like a small animal under the glare of a predator.
Fight that? Fight that, render it helpless, and hit it with the Judgment Blow at point-blank range? And I’m supposed to help with th
at?
No way.
I can’t do it. I mean, it’s taking everything I have to just stay here and not run away screaming.
As his knees and teeth chattered, Haruyuki watched as Chrome Disaster hunched over motionlessly. It was the pose of a carnivore unable to resist chasing down and slaughtering its prey; in this case, the members of the Yellow Legion running away, scattering in all directions.
Haruyuki prayed they could just let him go with the Yellow Legion. However.
Behind Chrome Disaster, as he began a fierce dash—
“Death by Piercing!!” Kuroyukihime’s voice rang out boldly.
The sword of her right arm nocked in her left thrust straight ahead, accompanied by an enormous noise like a jet engine. The violet glittering encasing the blade expanded and extended in a straight line nearly five meters long, coloring the world around her dazzlingly.
The incredible attack power released compressed the virtual air, and the view of the other side was distorted like a heat shimmer. The high-pitched sound of screeching destruction roared—but what was immediately cut off was just the horn extending from the right side of Chrome Disaster’s helmet.
Despite being targeted from behind in the best possible opening Kuroyuki would get—as it was the verge of taking pursuit—the blackish silver armor slid to the left, as if turning to mist, and evaded the attack.
The horn, whirling high up into the sky, dropped down, and pierced the surface of the blue-black ground with a thud.
“So. You dodged that,” Kuroyukihime uttered, almost admiringly, bringing the right arm she had thrust forward back to her body.
The tip of the large sword in his right hand clanged. It carved out the arc of a half-circle in the ground as Chrome Disaster turned around and returned what was clearly a roar of anger from between his enormous fangs. “Yurooooo!”
Raising his sword and setting it on his right shoulder, the diabolic knight glared directly at the jet-black beauty. From the depths of the jaw, slightly open beneath the hood, the deep red light of his eyes flickered repeatedly.