G-got it. I’m counting on the wing attack—I mean, Ektenia…Seriously, thanks, Metatron. For helping me.

  “…Foolish one. Save such words for after you have successfully rescued your comrade.”

  The cool voice hadn’t yet faded in his mind when he heard the light ringing of a bell, and the display in the left side of his field of view once again indicated that an Enhanced Armament was equipped. Metatron had materialized folded up on his back just like his own wings, and he felt a modest, yet reassuring weight there.

  He took a deep breath, concentrating his willpower deep in his belly, before turning toward his fated, bitter enemies. “I’ll rephrase then. This is where we settle things with the two of you.”

  Vise and Argon glanced at each other and chuckled. Stepping up to speak on both of their behalves was the “you” who had corrected Haruyuki before, Vise: “My apologies, Crow. And after you went to the trouble of correcting yourself. I wonder if I could ask you to correct once more the ‘two of you’ bit.”

  “…Is one of you planning on running?”

  “Ha-ha! Not likely! Just the opposite.” Vise threw his right arm out theatrically. “There is simply one more of us, you see.”

  In the next instant, an enormous dirt cloud rose up between the two encampments. A roar assaulted their ears, and a shock wave pushed toward them so that Haruyuki and his friends unconsciously pulled back.

  “What?!” Takumu shouted. “A long-distance attack?!”

  “No,” Haruyuki replied, looking straight up. “Something just fell from the sky!”

  From the explosive impact, the thing had to have fallen from a height of over a hundred meters. But there was nothing in the sky of the Twilight stage besides the thin orange clouds, so something flying at high altitudes hadn’t dropped an object on them. In which case, had the fallen object made it up into the sky on its own power and come crashing down? What on earth could…?

  Holding his breath, Haruyuki waited for the dust to clear. Finally, the wind blowing across the field gradually dissipated the fine particulate effect.

  It wasn’t a thing. Crouching on the marble tile was a human being—a duel avatar, its body curled up as tightly as possible, arms wrapped around both legs. The armor was a sober gray, and the head was tucked in so Haruyuki couldn’t see the face mask. He assumed this was the “one more of us” Vise was talking about, but there were still two things he couldn’t get his head around.

  One was why the avatar didn’t get hit with falling damage and die after crashing into the ground at that incredible speed. And the other was how a single duel avatar made it that high up in the first place. As far as Haruyuki knew, there were only two duel avatars who could ascend beyond a hundred meters under their own power. One was “Strong Arm” Sky Raker. And the other was, of course, him, Silver Crow. But the multitude of sharp edges covering the curled-up avatar was a far cry from Raker’s elegant flowing design.

  Hold on. Haruyuki had very recently witnessed one other duel avatar who could “fly.” Four days earlier, on Wednesday, the final stages of a normal duel in Nakano Area No. 2. His opponent had ripped off Silver Crow’s right arm and digested it, which allowed the avatar to temporarily reproduce the flight ability and fly.

  “No…way.” Haruyuki muttered hoarsely.

  Perhaps hearing these words, the duel avatar a dozen meters ahead of him unfolded its tightly bound arms and legs and slowly began to stand up. The evening sun, falling on the courtyard through the windows on the western side of the school building, reflected off the level surface of the main body of the armor, giving rise to a sharp shine.

  Metallic armor—a metal color. Even from this distance, he could clearly see the overwhelming density and hardness of the unusual texture, and there was no longer any doubt. That was the tungsten armor assessed by Magenta Blade as being the hardest in the Accelerated World.

  Haruyuki stared at the backlit face mask patterned after a wolf’s maw as it was slowly raised and shouted the avatar’s name.

  “Wolfram…Cerberus…!”

  4

  Kuroyukihime had tried any number of times to remember what specifically she had thought and felt in that moment.

  The first meeting of the Seven Kings in the Accelerated World held two years and ten months earlier, August 2044. On this occasion, the Red King, Red Rider, pleading for a truce among the seven Great Legions, had turned to the Black King and said If we ever meet in the real world, I could be friends with you. Totally. Actually, I want to be!

  This could also have sounded like a tentative push beyond the friendship that bound the young kings as Burst Linkers, depending on who was listening.

  Hey, Rider! The first to react had been the Purple King, Purple Thorn—who was closest with Rider at the time. You think I’m just gonna let that go?!

  N-no, that’s not it. I didn’t mean it like that…Ah, crap.

  The Blue King, Blue Knight, and the White King, White Cosmos, had laughed at this, and even the Yellow King, Yellow Radio, managed a few chuckles. Only the Green King, Green Grandé, had stopped at simply allowing his thick armor to creak slightly. In this venue of an amicable battle royale field, Kuroyukihime had thought it was possible that the two were parent and child.

  The Seven Kings, once called the Pure Colors, were the masters of the seven Great Legions and all veterans who had been fighting since the dawn of the Accelerated World. But that didn’t mean they were all Originators, the initial hundred players. Naturally, Kuroyukihime, the child of White Cosmos, was not; and she wasn’t certain, but there was a good chance that the White King herself was likewise not an Originator. She’d heard that the hundred people who received the BB program from the mysterious developer had started grade one in April 2039—in other words, children born in the year 2032, the same year as Kuroyukihime and a year after the White King.

  Why was the age of the Originators not the same as the oldest Burst Linkers? There were many theories, but the most plausible was that only about half the children born in 2031 could meet the conditions for the installation of the BB program. Neurolinker models for infants were developed in September of 2031, and it would have been impossible for children born before that to be equipped with a Neurolinker immediately after birth. At any rate, of the Seven Kings, the ones she could be most certain were Originators were Knight and Grandé.

  If Thorn and Rider are parent and child, or maybe in love, she will never forgive what I’m about to do. Kuroyukihime’s memories of her own thought process cut off there.

  Once the Kings’ laughter began to subside, she had stood up and approached Rider, showing her acceptance of the truce. Delighted, Rider had extended a hand to shake hers, and Kuroyukihime responded with an embrace. Thorn had objected with an even higher-pitched shriek, and laughter welled up once more. And then, that moment had been upon them.

  Black Lotus’s level-eight special attack, Death By Embracing. A range of mere tens of centimeters, but its power was limitless. When she had closed the swords of her crossed arms, anything within them was severed—no exceptions. Even if it happened to be the armor of a level-nine duel avatar.

  She didn’t remember what she had felt when the Red King’s head sat at the intersection of those two swords and his body crumpled to the ground at her feet before melting into countless thin ribbons and disappearing.

  N-nooooooooo!! the Purple King had shrieked, loud enough to be heard across the entire field.

  Is this your choice, Lotus?! the Blue King had roared, as if he’d switched personalities.

  And there, finally, the blank space of her memory ended. Yanking her bladed arms down sharply, the twelve-year-old Kuroyukihime thought, Four more.

  No matter how many burst points you accumulated, you couldn’t reach the final level of ten from level nine. The system required that you push five other level-nine Burst Linkers to total point loss. It was precisely because he knew this rule that Red Rider sought a truce among the kings—and also the reason why Black Lotus had lopped off his head. In the long history of the Accelerated World, the level-nine sudden-death rule had actually only been applied that one time—supposedly. Despite that Kuroyukihime had given herself over to madness and fought like a savage goddess, she hadn’t been able to strike down a single one of the other Kings. It was perhaps a miracle, in fact, that she’d survived until the end of the battle royale and returned to the real world.

  Two years and ten months had passed since then, and her memories of that night were closed off in a faint red fog; it was difficult to remember the details. But she had actually done it. When she opened her Instruct menu and looked at the level-up screen, a single red light flashed at the left end of the indicator of the five lives required to reach level ten. The name Red Rider was even displayed when she touched it. Which is why there was no way the first Red King could be there now.

  Kuroyukihime stared hard at the gunslinger-style duel avatar that had appeared from behind the ISS kit main body wearing a ten-gallon hat and a gun belt, one part of her mind running through the possibilities: Someone had transformed into Rider. Or she was being shown a projection with no physical substance. One of the two was the most likely explanation.

  But even as she hypothesized with her rational mind, she felt the truth of the situation instinctually, keenly. The voice. The tone. The mannerisms. The aura. All of it was that of the first Red King, the Master Gunsmith, Red Rider.

  Fuko, Akira, and Utai came to stand next to her, having apparently recovered from the shock before she did. The youngest, Utai, had very little direct experience with Rider, but Fuko and Akira were veterans on Kuroyukihime’s level; they had encountered him, exchanged words, and fought him any number of times in the battlefield.

  But both maintained their silence, neither speaking to the red avatar twenty meters before them. Kuroyukihime distinctly felt through her armor her comrades’ intention to leave all the decisions here to her.

  The frenzied night when she had taken Rider’s head—and the tragic collapse of Nega Nebulus at the Castle four months later. Kuroyukihime later learned that she had been deeply deceived and manipulated by the person she trusted most in the world. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. She would feel, think, choose, and decide on her own. As the master of the new Nega Nebulus; as the parent of a boy a year younger than she was, who was fighting in a different place right then at that very moment.

  “I believe I killed you, Red Rider.” Kuroyukihime uttered her first decisive words, eyes intent on the gunslinger approaching the massive jet-black eyeball.

  “Yeah, you did.” The red avatar had the air of a hazy smile. “That time, it was like, I went from Heaven to Hell, y’know? Just when I thought I was getting a hug from the no-touching-allowed World End, I get that, right?” He opened up two of the fingers of his right hand and closed them like a scissor’s snip.

  From hearing the way he so accurately captured the situation, his manner of speaking, and the boyishness lingering in his tone, she really couldn’t believe she was looking at anyone other than the first Red King. She shivered uncontrollably at her astonishment at the impossible, and in turn, the shock of memories she had buried deep in her being were instantly unearthed. But she willed all her strength into her legs and stayed on her feet.

  Five months earlier, when Kuroyukihime had agreed to assist the second Red King, Scarlet Rain, and joined the mission to subjugate the fifth Chrome Disaster, the Yellow King had surprised her with a video replay of Rider’s total point loss, and the shock of being ambushed with such a painful memory had forced her into a Zero Fill, rendering her helpless.

  A recording didn’t begin to compare with the impact of what was going on at that moment before her very eyes. But whatever came from this unnatural meeting, she had no intention of collapsing in such an unseemly fashion again.

  “So then, are you the ghost of a duel avatar? Or are you the first Burst Linker to find a way to reinstall Brain Burst after losing all your points? I suppose it’s one or the other.”

  “I s’pose so.” Rider tilted the brim of his hat at the hard echo in her voice and thought briefly. “If it has to be one or the other, I guess it’d be the first.”

  “Oh-ho, you were so consumed with hate, you became a ghost? Then you have perfect timing. I happen to be accompanied by a shrine maiden with the power of purification, so she can send you on your way.”

  She felt Utai twitch and stiffen beside her, and Fuko’s hand flashed out at inhuman speed to prevent the Shrine Maiden’s retreat. Taking courage—albeit only a tiny bit—from this small moment of normalcy between her friends, Kuroyukihime added, “Or perhaps you appeared because you have something to say. In which case, out with it. You do have the right to…blame me, after all.”

  Of course, Kuroyukihime didn’t believe they were seeing an actual ghost. He might have been banished from the Accelerated World, but the boy who had once been the Red King still lived somewhere in real Tokyo, even now. And he had lost any and all memory of his life as a Burst Linker.

  But on the other hand, anything could happen in the Accelerated World—within the limits of what the system allowed, naturally. The full-dive fighter game Brain Burst still hadn’t shown even a veteran among veterans like Kuroyukihime everything it had to offer. So a digital phantom in some system-approved form…was perhaps possible.

  “Well, you’re exactly right that I’m here ’cause I got something to say.” Rider crossed his arms, still leaning back against the kit main body. “But I’m not here with some grudge or the resentment you’re imagining. I know now: the real reason why you cut my head off in a surprise attack.”

  “…What did you say?” Kuroyukihime murmured, dumbfounded, massively shocked for the nth time in the last few minutes.

  The real reason Kuroyukihime had struck the Red King. The majority of Burst Linkers thought it was because she was trying to reach level ten before anyone else. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Behind the tragedy was also a certain someone who had told Kuroyukihime about the Seven Roads, the gun-type Enhanced Armament the Red King produced with his Arms Creation ability. That someone had informed her that they were the ultimate weapons of destruction, designed to keep the Accelerated World forever in a state of stagnation.

  But the only ones she’d confessed this truth to were the Four Elements of Nega Nebulus and her child, Silver Crow. There was no way they had given Rider that information; to start with, Rider was already gone by that point.

  No…There is one other person who knows the whole truth. The “puppet master” who had so deftly deceived and manipulated her.

  “His color.” Akira broke her silence quietly.

  “What’s wrong, Curren?” Fuko was quick to ask.

  “That avatar,” Akira said, lowering her voice even further. “His color’s starting to change.”

  Kuroyukihime stared intently at the gunslinger twenty meters ahead of her. The color of the armor of the duel avatar standing alongside the ISS kit main body was exactly the same as Red Rider’s in her memory, a pure and singular red that defied any kind of descriptive adjective—and yet. When she really strained her eyes, she saw that Akira was right. The color was steadily changing from the feet sunken into the gloom. From a dark, dirty bloodred, through the purple of twilight, and into a matte black reminiscent of partly burned charcoal.

  Sensing the eyes of the four Burst Linkers firmly fixed on him, Rider also looked down at his feet and clicked his tongue lightly. “Tch! You’re here already? I figured I had three minutes, though…”

  “What’s the meaning of this?!” Kuroyukihime yelled in frustration. “Are you really Rider?! Aren’t you here because you have something to say?!”

  But instead of answering her, the gunslinger—now black up to his hips—tipped his hat apologetically. “Sorry, Lotus. We’ll finish this chat after we fight.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Listen, you win, okay? Be more merciless than last time. Beat me black-and-blue. The more energy gets used up, the longer I can be me.”

  “…Win? Against who?”

  “Well, against…me, of course.” The Red King spread out his arms and shrugged lightly while the charcoal erased the red of his chest, his neck, and then finally, his face mask. The shallow V of his goggles was filled with a viscous darkness.

  Bwwm. An unpleasant vibration accompanied a flash of light the color of blood beyond the goggles. And then, a murderous aura gushed from the avatar’s slender frame to nearly cover the floor, and Kuroyukihime and her comrades gasped. They knew this bottomless hunger—this somehow inorganic wave. The same aura the ISS kit users under Magenta Scissor were cloaked in when they had fought them earlier in the field on the north side of Midtown Tower.

  Standing fixed in place, the four Burst Linkers stiffened for the merest of moments, and as if aiming for that opening, Red Rider’s hands, blackened all the way to the fingertips, flashed so quickly they blurred. He grabbed the two guns on either side of his gun belt, drew them, and aimed; the whole process took essentially zero seconds.

  I made it.

  Niko still exists in this world.

  The instant Mihaya set eyes upon Scarlet Rain, captive on the black cross, a smoothly liquid relief rose up in her chest. But a fraction of a second later, overwhelming rage set flame to that liquid.

  Rain’s armor was cruelly splintered, and she was unconscious—no light in her eye lenses. On top of that, she was crucified like a historical criminal receiving the death penalty, her arms spread wide. Mihaya would never forgive this treatment of the Red King, the leader of Prominence. Never.

  Propelled by the flames of rage burning inside her, Mihaya forgot the pain in her left shoulder from Argon Array’s laser and let out a roar. She sank down, preparing to leap the three stories from the roof to Black Vise, Rain’s captor. But she managed to control herself, somehow.

 

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