The Red Storm Princess

  “Right? Right.” Relieved to have avoided a serious eruption, Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down.

  Her expression finally settling into a wide, bitter smile, Kuroyukihime shook her head several times and said in a low voice, “Well…it’s not as if there isn’t an aspect of this that isn’t quite lucky. A direct duel with a King is precious. You could never buy such an experience, no matter how many Burst Points you accumulated. How was she then, the second Red King?”

  “Ridiculous. With one move, she sent half the government building flying…and she smashed my place in one go basically.” Haruyuki recalled again that transcendental heat power and shuddered all over.

  Watching him, Kuroyukihime laughed softly. “That type of thing is precisely the might of a singular specialized ability. I’ve heard that Scarlet Rain put all of her level-up bonuses into enhancing her long-range heat attack. Which reminds me, did the Red King move during your duel?”

  “Huh?” For a moment, Haruyuki failed to grasp the meaning of the question and blinked furiously before quickly realizing what Kuroyukihime had left unsaid.

  Right. Now that he thought about it, the Red King Scarlet Rain had transformed into her duel avatar before his eyes, clad herself in that fortresslike heavy armament, and then hadn’t moved an inch until she finally cut loose with her antiaircraft free-for-all after leveling Haruyuki’s condo.

  Abruptly, he stopped shaking his head.

  That wasn’t right. At the very end of the end of the duel, when she dodged Haruyuki’s full-speed plummet attack, the Red King definitely moved, although only by a single step—

  “Oh, she did move. But it was only, like, five centimeters or so.”

  Hearing this, Kuroyukihime finally grinned again and clapped her hands together. “Well! That’s really something! Scarlet Rain’s other name, Immobile Fortress, was given to her not because she never moves, but because she never has to move. According to the rumors, in a large-scale battle—large enough to rouse the interest of the second Red King—she slaughtered nearly thirty enemies without moving one step from the coordinates where she appeared.”

  “Whoa…” Haruyuki gasped reflexively. And there he was, charging an opponent like that head-on. Ignorance was a terrifying thing. “I-if I’d known all that, I would’ve surrendered as soon as the duel started. I mean, you know you’re up against a King, you flat-out say no before you even get to the duel. But from the whole ‘Six Kings of Pure Color’ bit, I just sort of assumed that the Red King was for sure a red something or other,” he said.

  Still with a smile on her face, Kuroyukihime replied, “Which is why I said on the phone that you need to study more. In the Accelerated World, crowning the red symbol, none other than Red Rider—” Having gotten this far, she stopped abruptly.

  Haruyuki stared, dumbfounded, as the vestiges of the smile on her lips melted away and disappeared. The blood drained from her white skin, turning it pale like ice.

  “K-Kuroyukihime…?”

  “No, it’s nothing.” The voice and wide eyes offering this reply to Haruyuki’s question, however, were completely lifeless.

  Ruled by an empty expression, Kuroyukihime slowly turned her face downward. He saw her right hand, still on the table, tremble, and he finally—and quite belatedly—realized the reason for her reaction.

  The previous Red King. Red Rider.

  This was the first time he had heard the name from her mouth. But he already knew why the Burst Linker with that name had left the Accelerated World. Two years earlier, Kuroyukihime—the Black King known as Black Lotus—had chopped his head off with her own hands. But she’d done so while they were at a meeting of the Seven Kings, rather than in the usual duel field, taking her speechifying opponent by surprise.

  The cruel reality of battle between level-nine Burst Linkers was that if you were defeated just once, you lost all your Burst Points. Naturally, it went without saying that total point loss meant the permanent loss of Brain Burst itself.

  Staring at Kuroyukihime’s pale hands clasped tightly on the table, Haruyuki asked, half involuntarily, “Kuroyukihime…was the former Red King…to you, was…”

  Was he not just a friend, but someone more special?

  At the last second, he was self-aware enough to see that this question came from his own jealousy rather than concern for the person in front of him, and Haruyuki clamped his mouth shut in the middle of asking. He then bowed his head low. “I’m sorry. I’m being thoughtless. Last night on the phone, too…and this question now. I’m sorry, I really am.”

  “…No. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” Her voice was husky, having lost all smoothness. “This is the path I chose. It’s immature of me to react like this. Heh…I thought I had come to terms with all of this inside myself quite some time ago. After all, I made up my mind that every other Burst Linker is an opponent, that is, an enemy. But catch me by surprise, and look what happens. It’s the height of ridiculousness.” She laughed gravely and repositioned her right hand to rest on her knee.

  Haruyuki spontaneously reached forward to envelop that hand. Kuroyukihime gasped and pulled hers back firmly, but Haruyuki resisted the tug with an uncharacteristic obstinance.

  Although she was bathed in sunlight from the window, she was cold like a stone statue. So much so that he could practically hear the creaking as her tendons stiffened to their limits.

  Summoning every bit of body heat he had to try and warm her hand, Haruyuki opened his mouth. “I—I…”

  Despite the fact that he had a clear idea in his head of what he wanted to say, the ability to put it into words did not follow. As if unaware of the glances turned toward them from the lounge—which was quickly filling with students—Haruyuki moved his mouth desperately. “I absolutely will not fight you. I absolutely will not be an enemy. You’re my ‘guardian,’ and I’m your ‘child.’ Before we’re fighters, we’re family, right?”

  The silence continued momentarily before Kuroyukihime finally lifted her face, staring slightly upward at Haruyuki and nodding slowly. She smiled faintly, as if somehow sad.

  “Shall we go someplace else?” She nearly sighed the words, but she did manage to return her right hand to its resting spot, unhindered this time.

  She stood up smoothly and started to walk, carrying the hardcover book with her. Following her back, Haruyuki asked, “Wh-where?”

  Somewhere we can be alone.

  Instead, Kuroyukihime’s response was exceedingly businesslike. “We can’t exactly decide how to handle Scarlet Rain with just the two of us, can we? This type of thing has to be discussed by the entire Legion. We’ll buy some sandwiches or something for lunch.”

  “Oh…r-right.” Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down as he felt simultaneously disappointed and relieved by Kuroyukihime’s return to normal.

  The Black Legion, Nega Nebulus.

  In contrast to the majestic scale of the name—Dark Nebula—the Legion was extremely small, made up at present of just three people, the last of whom responded to Haruyuki’s mail with “I’m on the roof.”

  Pulling his neck in at the blast of cold air when he opened the steel door, Haruyuki was just able to make out a single person sitting on a bench way off to the side. Even as he hurried over, the figure sat so still that Haruyuki could almost imagine him as an actual painting, although of a different nature than Kuroyukihime’s.

  Tall frame, thin, but solid with muscle. The profile beneath the longish bangs, gently ruffled by a soft wind, held a calm sharpness reminiscent of a Japanese sword. Facing slightly downward, the fingers of his right hand were racing along in the air, likely operating a holo keyboard; but even this movement conjured thoughts of a samurai seated in Zen meditation somehow.

  Hearing their footsteps, the young man raised his head, and Haruyuki lifted a quick hand. “Hey! Sorry for bugging you when you’re studying. But do you have to do every single thing in this stupid-cold place, Taku?”

  Takumu Mayuzumi—Taku, Haruyuki’s childhood f
riend and battle companion—grinned from behind frameless glasses. “Doesn’t the sun feel good today, though? You should get some sun sometimes, too, Haru.” He then stood up briskly and bowed deeply to Kuroyukihime, who stood behind Haruyuki.

  “Good morning, Master!”

  “Mmm, morning, Takumu.” Dipping her head, Kuroyukihime brought a wide, wry grin to her face. “As I’ve told you countless times, although it is true that I am the Legion Master, there is absolutely no need to always refer to me by that title.”

  “Apologies. But it really works best for me.” Takumu took a slight step and gestured with his left hand toward the bench where he had been seated up to then.

  Still wearing that same grin, Kuroyukihime sat, crossing her thin, black-encased legs before she arched a single questioning eyebrow, looked at Takumu, and said, “Excuse Haruyuki and me as we eat lunch here. And you? What about your lunch?”

  “Yes, I’ve already eaten.”

  Haruyuki looked and saw a lunch box neatly wrapped up in a corner of the bench. He felt like he had seen the cloth covering it before and remarked lightly, “Chiyu made that, right? In which case, the two of you should have eaten together!”

  Takumu turned a bitter smile toward him. “We’re not like you and Master. We don’t have the kind of relationship where we can be all openly lovey-dovey at school.”

  “W-we’re not lovey-dovey!”

  “We are not lovey-dovey.”

  When Haruyuki denied the charge in concert with Kuroyukihime, Takumu grinned and pushed his glasses up with a fingertip. “Talk about how you guys just sit and stare at each other in the lounge every day, this fluffy pink halo hovering over you, has made it all the way to my class even. Well, anyway, whatever. I’ve stopped rushing. I’ll redeem myself bit by bit for all the things I need to redeem myself for.”

  Haruyuki put on a serious face and nodded. “…Right.”

  A mere two weeks earlier, Takumu had transferred from the school in Shinjuku he had been attending for seven years to Umesato JH the day the third term started. His old school was integrated from elementary all the way through to university, so Haruyuki had said it was a waste to transfer and tried to stop him. He remembered how hard little Takumu had worked for the entrance exam. But Taku’s resolve was firm.

  It wasn’t for some pessimistic reason, like the fact that Shinjuku was a battlefield under Blue Legion control. Takumu had decided to put all of his time toward atoning for his crimes—hacking the Neurolinker of his childhood friend and girlfriend, Chiyuri Kurashima, breaking the rules of the Accelerated World, hunting Kuroyukihime.

  An atonement that consisted primarily of always being by Chiyuri’s side and continuing to fight desperately to protect Suginami, the territory of Nega Nebulus. Haruyuki wondered if even the glasses he had started wearing this winter were a show of this resolve.

  As of the present, the year 2047, glasses had lost their original function as a tool to correct vision and had become a fashion item because the Neurolinkers on everyone’s necks were equipped with powerful visual compensation. But Takumu’s blue glasses were not an accessory. The lenses were the real prescription deal. In other words, Takumu had stopped using his Neurolinker to correct the nearsightedness that was a consequence of studying too much with paper media and panel terminals.

  As powerful as the Neurolinker was, it didn’t have the power to adjust the focus of the crystalline lens of a flesh-and-blood eyeball. Instead, it synthesized the blurry visual field captured by nearsighted eyes with the images from the Neurolinker’s internal camera and corrected the perceived scene digitally in real time. Which meant that over half of the world seen by people using the Neurolinker instead of glasses was made up of virtual images generated by the CPU.

  Takumu had rejected that function and apparently decided to see the real world with his own eyes. The real Chiyuri, the real Haruyuki, his own real self.

  At some point, even Chiyuri, as awkward and weird as she still is right now, is going to see how you feel, Takumu. You’ve already shown her plenty what those feelings are.

  Haruyuki wanted to say this to his friend, but it was pretty difficult. Despite what he said, Takumu sometimes got a look in his eyes like he was still tormenting himself. The same look Kuroyukihime got in her eyes when the topic of the previous Red King came up.

  Shaking off these random thoughts, Haruyuki sat down next to Kuroyukihime and opened up his lunch bag. As he stuffed his face with a pork cutlet sandwich, he explained the situation once again, this time to Takumu, who was leaning up against the fence facing them.

  Once he had finished listening to the whole story with wide eyes, Takumu nodded briefly. “Hmm.”

  “What do you think, Taku?”

  “Well, even if we tried to guess what the Red King intends to say to Master, we don’t have enough data to make those guesses meaningful. But I feel like I understand what she was planning to do if she had been able to keep up the charade for three days without exposing her true identity to you.”

  “Wow!”

  “Oh ho!”

  Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime let out exclamations at the same time, and Takumu turned toward them to continue speaking, the lenses of his glasses sparkling.

  “Given your personality, Haru, if you had lived with her for three days, you’d have ended up fairly attached to your ‘little sister.’ And if she had said something along the lines of ‘The truth is, I’m a Burst Linker. But because I’m a kid, all the big kids in the Legion steal the points I worked so hard to collect. Please, big brother, join my Legion and protect me!’…”

  “Now really! That’s ridiculous!” Kuroyukihime shouted, astonished. “Would anyone get tripped up by such an obvious trap? Quite the opposite, I would think; it would be plain as day that she would strip away all your points. However inclined Haruyuki might be, he would never…”

  Here, she glanced over at Haruyuki.

  “He…would never…”

  She was speechless. Probably because she noticed Haruyuki was involuntarily tearing up.

  “What is wrong with you?!”

  “I-it’s just…I mean, bullying, poor thing…”

  As soon as he spoke, Kuroyukihime reached out with her left hand to pinch Haruyuki’s cheek and yank it. “Whah haa ee oin oo do?”

  “I’ll tell you right now,” Kuroyukihime whispered, glaring at him with eyes lit by an ember deep within. “You try anything noble like temporarily moving to another Legion to help your little sister, and you won’t be coming back.”

  “Huh? Hai’s aat?”

  Releasing his cheek with a snap, the master of the Nega Nebulus Legion answered in a tone dialed up to evoke maximum terror. “You can’t have forgotten. What was the fate of Takumu’s ‘guardian,’ the senior Blue Legion member who disseminated that back door?”

  “Uh, um…I’m pretty sure there was talk of a total point loss…so, uh, a revocation of Brain Burst…”

  In front of Haruyuki, Takumu cocked his head and added by way of explanation, “About that ‘total loss.’ It’s not as if he was thrown into duels and forced to fight until all his Burst Points were gone. In practice, that’s just not possible. If you simply disconnected from the global net and removed your Neurolinker the moment the first duel was over and the acceleration released, you could escape the duels and the loss of points for the time being. Although the fate awaiting you after that would be being chased for the bounty, like Master here.”

  “Uh…uh-huh. Right.”

  “But you don’t need to go to all that trouble. The Legion Master has a simpler method of ‘executing’ subordinates.”

  “Wh-what?! I haven’t heard anything about that!!” This was complete news to Haruyuki, and he whirled his head around to look at Kuroyukihime next to him.

  The older student, expression serene, opened up her right hand in a shrug. “It’s written right there in the document shown when you apply to join a Legion. It’s your fault for not reading it. And I don’t have any par
ticular reason to execute you, do I? Other than, of course, if you cheat on me with some other girl.”

  Grin.

  That smile, so full of affection, made him sit up perfectly straight. “I—I would never do that. B-but I kinda want to know this as a thing to know. Execution…what specifically does that…?”

  “Mmm. Yes…well, we could call it a type of special attack. The moment you apply to the system to create a Legion and are registered as its master, it appears in your command list; the name of the technique is fixed. Very decisively, Judgment Blow.”

  “Judgment…,” Haruyuki muttered, and Kuroyukihime turned her eyes softly from him, continuing her explanation with an increasingly serious expression.

  “By joining a Legion, that is, a team, a Burst Linker obtains a large measure of security. Group battles reduce your risk and also stabilize your returns. As compensation for that advantage, there is the Judgment Blow. To participate in a Legion is to submit your life to its master. Legion members who receive this blow have their points zeroed out immediately and lose Brain Burst forever. The term of validity of this attack is during the period of Legion membership and one month after leaving the Legion.”

  “E-even a month later?”

  “Mmm. That is to say, if you were disappointingly deceived by the Red King’s social engineering, if you were to leave Nega Nebulus and join the Red Legion for even a short time, in that instant, you…It would be the same as giving her the power of life and death over Silver Crow.”

  “Whaaaat…” was all he could say.

  In all honesty, he couldn’t deny the possibility that he would have totally bought into the Red-King-as-his-second-cousin-Tomoko thing if he hadn’t found that picture on his grandparents’ home server. And after sleeping and waking up together for two nights like that, if she had come at him with the “Actually, I” attack Takumu guessed at earlier, he might have even given into his emotions and casually joined the Red Legion. It definitely could have happened.