The Red Storm Princess

  Her reaction was immediate and graphic.

  For a brief instant, the look on Tomoko’s sweet face was the very definition of surprise. Her cheeks were probably dyed red for reasons other than bashfulness, and her right eye twitched convulsively.

  But impressively, the girl, who age-wise was definitely at least around ten, cocked her head and said in an even sweeter voice, “What, big brother? What are you talking about? Berr…st? What’s that?”

  “Tan,” Haruyuki murmured in response.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got clean tan lines on your neck. About the same as me. That’s the kind of tan you can’t really get unless you’ve been wearing one constantly from the time you were born…A Neurolinker, I mean.”

  Tomoko—or rather, the girl who was likely not Tomoko—covered her neck quickly with both hands.

  “And,” Haruyuki continued, “there are still pictures from five years ago on my grandpa’s home server. Tomoko Saito’s in them, too, you know? I’ll just say this, you’re about ten times cuter.”

  The girl’s face spasmed again before devolving into a look that was actually complicated. Finally, her flickering expression settled down into a sulky grimace, light-years from the naive mask she’d been showing him up to then.

  “Tsk!” She placed both hands on her toweled hips and clucked her tongue fiercely. “And after I went and checked the albums here. Never expected you to go and dig them up at your grandpa’s. You’re pretty suspicious.”

  Flustered at the sudden change in her tone, Haruyuki somehow managed to reply, “Y-you went too far. I’m assuming the mail to my mom from Saito was a fake, but what if she’d decided to double-check with him?”

  “All mails and calls generated from your mom’s Neurolinker are set to be intercepted and sent to me. It took me three days to get everything ready.”

  “Well…good, job, I guess…” An incredulous voice slid out from between Haruyuki’s lips as he clung to the edge of the bathtub.

  The only way to get a virus into someone else’s Neurolinker was to connect directly with a cable. Most likely, this girl had been tracking Haruyuki’s mother’s movements and had connected to her Neurolinker in the locker room of the gym she always went to.

  Naturally, he wasn’t exactly pleased that something like this had been done to a close relative, but honestly, he was impressed. A lot of Linkers called themselves hackers or wizards, but most of these soldiers weren’t too keen on leaving the safety of their own homes to tackle some social engineering in the real world—becoming another person, the ultimate hacking to break security off-line.

  Perhaps hearing the praise contained in Haruyuki’s voice, the girl smiled confidently, almost smugly.

  Looking up at that smile, Haruyuki continued spelling out his hypothesis. “I guess you went to all this trouble because you want to use me as a stepping-stone to hack her, but you’re too optimistic. She’d have realized you’re a fake the second she saw you. Unlike me taking five hours…And you know, I totally get how you’d be feeling like you’d lose if you just went and challenged her to a fight as a Burst Linker. I mean, you’d be going up against the Black Lotus.”

  When Haruyuki finished his grumbling speech, wishing the whole time she would hurry up and get out, the girl’s attitude changed abruptly once again. Her eyes glinted fiercely, shining the same shade of red as her hair. Glossy lips twisted into an unbecoming sneer, revealing the tiniest hint of white teeth in the gap.

  She looked down at Haruyuki with an expression that could only be described as arrogant and said in a low voice, “Hey, hold up. What’d you just say?”

  “Huh? I—I said…if you were to challenge her—”

  “I’d lose? Me? And that’s why I’m here on this superannoying, secret, real-life hack?”

  Is it not? As Haruyuki asked the question with his eyes, the girl reached up with her right hand and ripped the towel off of her head. She threw it on the floor and shot her index finger out at him.

  Her red hair, nearly crimson in the steam, was practically standing on end. Short, it rippled like fire as the girl threatened, “God! Enough! Let me lay it down for you: Lady Scarlet Rain here’s gonna take that insult outta your tanned hide, so you stay right there like a good little lamb while I go get my Neurolinker!!”

  Tucking her index finger back into her hand, she stuck her thumb out, turned it downward, and then yanked it off to the side before whirling around forcefully. Her right foot, poised to take a step forward, encountered the towel she’d just tossed aside and slipped.

  “Hyaa?!” High-pitched shrieking.

  Looking up at the girl falling, essentially somersaulting backward, Haruyuki cried out, too. “Whoa?!”

  His arms shooting out automatically, he caught her just as she was about to crash into the edge of the bathtub. But his foot slipped in the bath, and Haruyuki also went tumbling backward.

  Splooosh!

  A magnificent clamor went with a tall pillar of water and a large bath towel fluttering alongside it.

  Haruyuki bumped his head on the wall behind him and closed his eyes tightly, riding out the pain before raising his eyelids slightly to assess the damage.

  Himself in the large tub flat on his back. The redheaded girl using his plump belly as a cushion. His arms wrapped tightly around that slim torso.

  And both of them butt naked.

  “Aaaaah?!” Haruyuki cried, which was drowned out by the girl’s “Eeeeeeeeee!!”

  Writhing frantically, she escaped the tub in a single leap, employing the propulsion from a foot stomping down on Haruyuki’s stomach. She grabbed the bath towel from the floor and flew into the changing room before showing her face again.

  “I’m going to beat you to death.”

  Listening to the sound of her footsteps as she dashed toward the living room, Haruyuki was stunned.

  I saw her. I touched her…

  No, wait. She’s probably an assassin from one of the Legions of the Six Kings. And what she just said now, that probably means she’s coming to challenge me to a duel.

  In which case, maybe he ought to take off his Neurolinker and avoid her? But if he was going to have to face her as an enemy at some point, it would be better to find out what was going on sooner rather than later. Now that he was just barely level four, he wouldn’t lose too many points if he failed to win one duel. And he didn’t have to worry about his defeat being too embarrassing if his opponent was a child.

  Although 80 percent or so of his brain was in a state of total confusion, the remaining 20 percent had managed to reach this point, and Haruyuki recalled the name she’d given him.

  “Scarlet Rain.” He was pretty sure he’d never heard it before. She was probably a distance-attack red on the color circle, but he would be rash to jump to the conclusion that she was a Red Legion Burst Linker based on that alone. He’d be able to confirm that soon enough if he got into a duel with her now, but he wanted more information.

  He probably still had a minute or two before the girl equipped her Neurolinker, turned the OS on, and finished the quantum connection check. He muttered voice commands, still seated in the bathtub. “Command. Voice call. Number zero one.”

  Instantly before his eyes, the holo dialogue A VOICE CALL WILL BE PLACED TO THE REGISTERED ADDRESS 01. OKAY? popped up. He promptly pressed YES.

  His interlocutor picked up on the second ring. “It’s me. What’s wrong, Haruyuki, calling so late?” In the background behind the smooth, graceful voice with its musical intonation, he could hear the sound of water splashing.

  Oh, so she’s in the bath, too…This thought flashing through his mind, Haruyuki began speaking to the person on the other end of the call, Kuroyukihime. She was one of the strongest Burst Linkers, Black Lotus, the Black King.

  “Sorry to call so late. I was just hoping you could tell me something.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  “Do you know a Burst Linker called Scarlet Rain?”

 
The answer to his question was a slightly long silence.

  “Uh, um, are you okay?”

  “Oh, sorry. So you’re seriously asking me that?”

  “Serious? Of course. I wouldn’t prank call you at this time of night.”

  “I see. Hmm. I suppose this is an oversight on my part. We only use nicknames; I haven’t told you any real names, have I? But, Silver Crow, this is a bit of laziness on your part as well.”

  “Huh? I…What do you—?” Cocking his head, Haruyuki could hear tiny feet trotting down the hall over Kuroyukihime’s cool voice.

  “Scarlet Rain. Immobile Fortress, Bloody Storm…The second Red King herself?”

  Huh? Both eyes popped open, his jaw dropped, and his brain stopped.

  As if on cue, the redheaded girl reappeared, nearly slamming into the bathroom door. She looked pretty furious, in nothing more than a cute underpants set. But she seemed uninterested in hiding anything anymore, and she proudly revealed her white body, crossing her arms in front of her.

  Reflexively averting his eyes, Haruyuki noticed the one item other than underwear on the girl’s body—wrapped around the slim neck, sleek, with a transparent red sheen—and stared incredulously.

  The girl flashed him a ferocious grin and cried out in a voice full of both sweetness and menace, “Burst Link!!”

  Skreeeeee!!

  Although the screeching filling the world around him was familiar to him now, it never failed to send a shiver up Haruyuki’s spine. Instantly, his real-world senses were disconnected, and the words HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER! blazed up in the darkness before his vision returned to him.

  But what he saw was no longer his own bathroom, ivory cosmetic panels attached to the wall, but an expansive flat space, such that he could only assume that several floors had been knocked out of his condo building.

  Haruyuki was deep in a full dive into the virtual world created by Brain Burst, the thought-accelerating, fighting game application in his Neurolinker. The world around him was a virtual duel field recreated from images from the social camera net laid out all over Japan.

  But because, as a general rule, there were no social cameras in people’s homes, including Haruyuki’s, the game came up with this kind of supplementary extrapolation—in other words, a fabrication by the software. This time, the condo appeared to have been sent back to a time when it was still being built. Sprawling floors of bare concrete were pierced only by intermittent steel-frame girders.

  In this stark space, Haruyuki and the girl faced each other in the flesh, albeit for a mere half second. Soon, however, the color and form of their bodies began to change. Into their alternate selves, their fighting duel avatars.

  A silver glow reached up from the tips of Haruyuki’s rounded limbs, enveloping and narrowing them at the same time, stretching them thinner and thinner while giving rise to mechanical arms wrapped in silver armor. The transformation immediately spread to his torso, cutting the girth of his stomach in half in an instant. As his superfine metal body neared completion, an orb of white light swallowed his head, encircling it in a smooth, round, mirrored helmet.

  Aware of his own body’s transformation into his duel avatar, Silver Crow, Haruyuki stared intently at the girl standing several meters in front of him.

  Her arms and legs, slender like a doll’s, were suddenly enveloped in a scarlet radiance. As the circle of light climbed upward, it was replaced by clear, ruby-colored armor. Her perfectly flat stomach and chest were also subsumed by the semitransparent armor, with dark gray and ruby as the two highlights. Finally, in a flash of brilliance, an android-like head appeared.

  A mask with nothing more than two rounded eyes. Antennas shaped like bundles of bound hair protruded from both sides of the armor. The pigtails bounced pertly; the eyes shone sharply, a vivid red.

  This is the Red King?

  Still standing bolt upright, Haruyuki looked intently at the duel avatar several meters ahead of him. She was small. She couldn’t have been more than a mere hundred and thirty centimeters. The only thing weapon-like about her was a handgun that looked like a toy dangling from her right hip.

  “Uh, um.” His mouth moved spontaneously, and a voice with a metallic effect leaked out from beneath the mirrored helmet. “You’re really…”

  Are you really one of the Six Kings of Pure Color, a level-nine Burst Linker, one of only seven in the Accelerated World, a powerful ruler leading an enormous Legion?

  It was when he tried to ask this question that the space behind the cute girl-shaped avatar abruptly warped and distorted.

  Four rough blocks glittering a deep crimson appeared, as if called up from the ether. They quickly covered the girl’s arms and legs. Armor plates followed, rolling up from the sides, completely concealing the slim body.

  “Wha…” Haruyuki gaped at the crimson avatar, which had, in an instant, gained several times his own mass.

  However, the arrival of the extra armor didn’t stop there. With a low, heavy banging, enormous hexagonal pillars, cylinders, plates, and more appeared in rapid succession and converged on each other. The avatar grew to nearly ceiling height instantaneously, quickly bridging the two meters to close the gap with Silver Crow, who hurriedly stepped back. Then it exceeded three meters.

  A few seconds later, when silence finally returned, the thing towering before Haruyuki’s eyes could only be called a tank, or maybe a fort. Two enormous gun barrels slowly rose, extensions of the original arms, and white smoke puffed out from cooling vents here and there. In the center of this weapons cache, two red eyes, barely visible, glowered brightly.

  “No way…,” Haruyuki muttered, as the word FIGHT!! glittered before his eyes in a flaming font before exploding and dissipating into nothingness.

  Whatever! For now, just run!! Haruyuki thought immediately, turning to speed off in a fierce dash—before just barely stopping himself.

  The enemy’s affiliation was long-range red. This enormous fortress-shaped duel avatar was, without a doubt, a demon when it came to distance attacks. In addition to the gun batteries on the left and right, the housings on both shoulders were most likely missile pods, and the short gun barrel protruding from the front was probably some kind of machine gun. Getting distance from an opponent like this was sheer stupidity.

  Having made this judgment and mustering what little courage he had, Haruyuki turned again to face his opponent. He stood stock-still, exposed to the crimson gaze of the fortress avatar Scarlet Rain.

  “So, you’re not running, huh? You sure got guts,” the Red King uttered in a voice that was both metallic and adorable.

  “I-I-I’m too freaked out to move,” he replied pathetically, earnestly running his gaze over every centimeter of the king.

  In games, the usual attack strategy for this kind of enormous and heavily armed boss was to stake your life on close approaches from blind spots to take out weak points. Charging her from the front was clearly off the table, and her sides were most likely within range of the adjustable main arsenal. In which case, he’d have to go in directly behind her. If he could put everything he had into a dash around her and attach himself to her back…

  Perhaps realizing what Haruyuki was thinking, perhaps not, Scarlet Rain giggled. “You say the cutest things! But you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

  “Huh? F-forgotten what?”

  “The fact that…” The main weapon on her right suddenly squealed into motion to target Haruyuki. “…I told you I was going to kill you, you friggin’ perv!!”

  “That was an act of God, okaaaaaaay!!” Haruyuki screamed back, kicking the ground savagely. He charged like a bolt of lightning toward the enemy’s left flank, turned sharply, and headed for her back.

  Scarlet Rain’s swiftness turning as she followed Haruyuki was surprising given her enormous size, but even so, it wasn’t enough to keep pace with the rushing velocity of Silver Crow, a duel avatar singularly specialized for speed.

  “And you were the one who just came waltzin
g into the baaaaaath!!” Raising his voice in a cry once more as he dashed in close, Haruyuki plunged unhesitatingly forward, his enemy’s back finally coming into view.

  As expected, her rear harbored nothing more than very long radiation fins and thrusters; he didn’t see any weapons. He set his sights on the place where the armor looked thinnest, the area where a missile pod connected with a fin, raised his right fist, and—

  Thrusters?

  The second this thought flashed through his mind, the four black jet nozzles began emitting intense flames.

  “Gaaaahot!!” Haruyuki shouted, instantly engulfed in the blaze, which produced an overwhelming sensation of heat and whittled away at his hit point gauge in the top left of his field of vision.

  But he couldn’t stop his charge now. The damage wasn’t on a level he needed to worry about. Silver Crow, affiliated with the metallic colors, was resistant to heat attacks.

  “Fire doesn’t work on Silver Crow!!”

  Got you! Haruyuki channeled all his energy into a Punch, pummeling the joint in the rear armor. But…

  “Wishful thinking, kid!!” Scarlet Rain roared so gleefully he could almost see her laughter written in the air while the lids on the casings on her shoulders popped open.

  Seeing a barrage of countless little missiles let fly, Haruyuki’s eyes widened in shock.

  How…This…We’re in a…building…

  In a flash, the concrete ceiling and floor, the steel pillars—everything was engulfed in the bright red blossom of an explosion. Above his head as Haruyuki desperately dodged a missile headed straight for him, cracks lanced through the concrete like a net, and the whole structure began to crumble.

  “No way!” He just barely avoided an enormous chunk of debris falling toward him, the floor below his feet collapsing at an unbelievable pace.

  “No way?!” Screaming, Haruyuki dashed for all he was worth. He couldn’t just stand there worrying about getting too much distance from his enemy. They were on the twenty-third floor, far above the ground. If he got swallowed up in the collapse, his HP would probably vanish in a blink.