Pull of the Dark Nebula

by Reki Kawahara

  “No, I have an obligation to respond correctly. To what’s asked of me. If I simply answer offhandedly, it will be the root of trouble later. So I will think for a while about how my own condition is. Please proceed.”

  The F-type avatar rolled her eyes at this overly formal response before turning back to Mihaya. “Cassi is as stupidly serious as always, but whatever. Rain, Pard, it’s been ages, brahs! We’re always on different teams in the Terries these days, so I bet you missed me, huh? Maybe today’s special meeting is just ’cause you wanted to see my pretty face? Ah-ha-ha-ha!” Although her speech was casually masculine, her voice was sweetly sour and high, with a bit of a lisp, so listening to her speak so quickly was kind of dizzying.

  Mihaya stopped herself from shrugging, while Niko, next to her, raised an easy hand as she greeted them. “’Sup, Cassi, Pokki. Sorry for making you come out all of a sudden. But it’s not like I was all sad, y’know.”

  “As stubborn as ever, Rain. You actually just wanted to pat my fluffy fur, right? C’mon, here!” She darted over to Niko and rubbed up against her with her back, covered in fur-type armor, which was extremely rare in the Accelerated World. Although the Red King yanked herself backward at first, she gave in to the temptation and plunged both hands into the reddish-purple fur, moving them around roughly.

  “Aah, there. Right there. Aah, your hands are so small, just perfect. Ah, a little higher.”

  “C’mon. Didn’t you actually just want to be all fluffed up?” Even as she grumbled, Niko didn’t stop moving her hands.

  Mihaya had also petted the small avatar herself any number of times, and that fur was soft and smooth, honestly a first-rate texture. At least in general.

  The official avatar name of the F-type Niko called Pokki was Thistle Porcupine. Thistle from the plant—Porcupine, the animal. The common point being that both were thorny.

  Thistle let out a groan as she moved away from Niko, perhaps in satisfaction from the plentiful back scratches, and the M-type behind them started to speak once again.

  “When I assess my current state both in the physical and mental aspects, I find no major problems in terms of my health status, but I have been concerned about a slight pain in one of my back teeth for the past few days. On the other hand, my mental state is most certainly not poor because final exams are over, and it will be summer vacation soon. Thus, the answer to your earlier question is ‘not bad,’ Blood Leopard.”

  “Then say not bad right from the start! And go to the dentist!” Thistle groaned, the long fur on her back standing up slightly. “You get some nanomachines in there, that tooth’ll be fixed in no time!”

  “I have not overlooked this.” The M-type threw his massive horns back. “After this congregation, I have an appointment…With the dentist by the station.”

  “Ohh, by the station? That place? Telling us all that, it’s like you’re asking us to come take a peek. This is a chance to crack you in the real, Cassi!”

  “Ngh! Stop that! I am the type to strictly separate BB and the real!” The M-type—who appeared quite together but was occasionally not at all—was named Cassis Moose. Cassis was the plant, black currant, and moose was the large animal, so the naming pattern was exactly the same as Thistle. On top of that, the rich purple of their armors was also very similar. But that was where the similarities stopped. In addition to the horns, he had a massive frame and four sturdy limbs, with zero fur growing on his thick armor plates. Personality-wise, too, he could be said to have been a thinker amid the many impulsive types in the Red Legion—Thistle included.

  Cassis Moose, Thistle Porcupine, and Blood Leopard were the executive group of Prominence, supporting the second Red King. Since all three of their avatars were animal types, at some point, people started calling them by the nickname Triplex. But this sort of thing was apparently tradition with the seven major Legions.

  Once they had finished saying hello, Mihaya shot Niko a glance before saying, “I’d like to get started then.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Anytime.”

  Thistle and Cassis responded at the same time and instantly sobered. Both Thistle—with animal intuition—and Cassis—with advance information—had realized that the agenda for this special meeting was quite critical.

  Mihaya usually took on the responsibility of leading their regular meetings, but today she yielded that position to Niko. Stepping forward to take her place, the Red King didn’t speak right away, but rather looked wordlessly at each of the three members of the executive in turn. The small avatar, slightly smaller than Cassis and of the smallest class in the Accelerated World, suddenly seemed very large. “Cassi, Pokki, Pard. You remember the whole Cherry thing.”

  At this, Mihaya felt the air in the stage instantly grow even more tense.

  Cherry Rook, Scarlet Rain’s parent, had suddenly transformed into the fifth Chrome Disaster and attacked many Burst Linkers in the neutral areas in the vicinity of Ikebukuro. These included members of the other great Legions, who had concluded a mutual nonaggression treaty, and fearing that this would lead to strife among the Legions, Niko herself had directly contacted the just newly restored Black Legion, gained their assistance in subjugating Disaster, and banished Cherry Rook from the Accelerated World with her Judgment Blow.

  “How could we forget?” Thistle muttered distinctly. She had been close with Cherry Rook, whose armor was not only a similar color to her own, but who also had an animal avatar name. “Crypt Cosmic Circus gave Cherry the Armor. The Acceleration Research Society pulled the strings behind the scenes. I’ll never forgive them for it.” Her voice was quiet, but the fur on her back stood up silently. The long, fluffy bits of softness twisted together in strands of a dozen or so and began to transform into thick, sharp, striped spikes.

  Niko nodded slowly and opened her mouth once again. “We’ll definitely make Radio pay for that. But it’s the Society we need to deal with first somehow. Just like I told you before, that gang’s made a new armor, and they’re about to come in and mess things up again with it. Not to mention that the base of it is my own Enhanced Armament thruster. Before the same thing happens again, we’ve got to get it back.”

  “Agreed. But, Rain, even if we wanted to strike first, we don’t know who the Society really is. There’s no way to attack.” Thistle sounded annoyed, fur on her back still slightly standing. She still hadn’t been told the greatest secret concerning the Acceleration Research Society.

  Inside the black clouds that swirled so low that the avatars on the roof could almost reach out and touch them, something blinked faintly two or three times. After a second, the low rumble of distant thunder shook the ward office building.

  “Pokki—Thistle,” Niko corrected herself, using the other avatar’s proper name, a strong light shining in her eye lenses. “First, I gotta apologize for not reporting this sooner. A little while ago, I met the leader of the Acceleration Research Society.”

  “Aaaaah. And?!” Thistle shouted. Ping! A single 50-centimeter needle shot up from her back and dug deep into the concrete surface of the heliport. “Th-the leader…Not that Black Vise guy who attacked you pretending to be the Black King, but the big boss above him?!”

  “The big boss,” Niko confirmed. “But that boss was a dummy avatar for watching, so…Still, even as a dummy, she was ready to take on Pard and me and the whole lot of Nega Nebulus. If we had fought…we probably wouldn’t have won.”

  “Whaaaaaaa—?! You gotta be kidding!” Ka-ting! Two more needles shot out and stabbed the floor. “But with that lineup, you had two kings, right?! No way a dummy could win!!”

  “Nah.” Niko shrugged. “Looks like she’s a king, too, so.”

  “…Huh?” Thistle stopped dead in her tracks.

  “The Acceleration Research Society boss is the head of Oscillatory Universe, the White King—White Cosmos.”

  “…Huuuuuuuh?!”

  Mihaya watched as nearly ten needles shot out with this third scream and couldn’t help
but think The real surprise is still coming. Save those needles.

  Fortunately, Thistle managed to get her cool back somehow, and after a few deep breaths, she looked back and forth between Niko and Mihaya. “So you’re not kidding.”

  “Nah,” Niko replied.

  Mihaya nodded solemnly. The time the White King had appeared using a dummy avatar at Umesato Junior High (the Black Legion headquarters) was carved deep into her memory. Despite the fact that it had been a dummy, which only had the bare minimum of battle power, an overwhelming pressure had pushed down on her from above, and Mihaya had been unable to speak. But Niko, although she had likely been feeling the same thing, had brushed aside that terror and shouted, “You’re the one pulling the strings here?”

  She would never again be paralyzed in fear before Niko, not even up against the White King, not against Chrome Disaster, Mark II. Gritting her teeth with this resolve once more, Mihaya picked up the explanation from there. “The Acceleration Research Society hideout and the White Legion’s headquarters are in the same place—the private Eternal Girls’ Academy in Minato Area Three. Which means if the area stops being White territory, then there’s a good possibility Society members will show up on the matching list.”

  “If we could confirm that, it’s true that there wouldn’t be any further doubt,” Cassis Moose said, his voice ponderous. “It wouldn’t be easy, however, to say the least. To strip them of their right to block the matching list, the only option is to defeat them. In the Territories, against the White Legion. Is that possible, in the Accelerated World now?”

  “I don’t know if it’s possible. But they’re willing to try.” Mihaya took a breath. “This is totally top secret. In the Territories next week, Nega Nebulus is going to attack Oscillatory.”

  “Mmwhaaaaa—?!” Thistle Porcupine shrieked again, but this time, perhaps through self-restraint, none of the needles on her back went anywhere. “Attack…Negabu just got three new members, so they’re barely ten people now?! So if they leave three to defend Suginami, the attacking team’ll be, at most, seven. But Oscillatory’s defending team’ll be twice that—or in the worst case, three times! There’s no way they’re going to win!”

  “Well, they intend to win, and they’ll probably make a good show of it, at least,” Niko said as a preamble, arms crossed, and drew closer to the main topic. “But I think it’ll be a tough fight. Thinking about the worst case, there’s no way Lotus herself can be a part of the attacking team. But this mission’s a last chance for us in Prominence, too. To go up against the Society and get back my thruster, our only choice is to expose them here.”

  “I got a bad feeling about this, somehow,” Thistle muttered.

  Niko finally smiled at her, uttering the first of the meeting’s main points. “So I was thinking we should be a part of Negabu’s mission, too.”

  “…Nnmyug…” The strange sound the purplish porcupine made was probably from the effort of not shooting off all the needles on her back. She raised clawed hands before her, the upright needles on her back trembling. “H-hang on a sec. So like, Rain, I know you don’t wanna be lectured or anything on the basic rules of the Territories at this point, but I’ll just ask: Attacking teams in the Territories are in Legion units, so another Legion can’t be a guest in the fight or anything. You know that, right?”

  “Of course I know that.” Niko’s voice was stern.

  A note of tension came up even on the capreoline face of the silent Cassis Moose. Thistle cast a glance at him before launching her second question. “So help, that means, like, we put up another team and attack Minato One or Two or something, yeah? But our territories aren’t adjacent; we can’t attack. Which means…one of us leaves the Legion temporarily and joins Negabu?”

  “That’s the basic idea. But…if we’re all half-assed—‘someone,’ ‘temporarily’—we’ll never beat Oscillatory.”

  Perhaps anticipating the destructive power of the announcement Niko was about to make, the black clouds of the Thunder stage surged and twisted even more violently, and the low, heavy rumble of thunder echoed around them.

  “Pard and I are gonna go help in the Territories,” she finished.

  The needles on Thistle’s back stood up perfectly straight. “Mwah…?”

  “But then Nerima’s defense’ll be unstable, so we’re making it so we can call on help from Suginami at any time, too.”

  “Mwah…?!”

  “If you’re joking…”

  Koff! After clearing her throat, the Red King gave voice to her final comment:

  “Prominence and Nega Nebulus are going to merge.”

  “Mwaaaaaaaat?!” The shriek shook the duel stage, dozens of needles shot up into the air, and lightning bolts shot out of the sky one after the other, coloring the world in thunder and bright light.

  3

  Graphite Edge hadn’t cut the hole in the floor for a mere demonstration. Having proposed that they change venues once more, the avatar walked over to the hole and pointed to it as he said, a little boastfully, “We go down through this hole. It should be a serious shortcut. But even still, to reach the hall of the Arc, we’ll probably have to fight a couple guards.”

  Both of these guesses were correct. After jumping down the hole, the four of them only had to walk two hundred meters or so, but two Enemy guards stood in the middle of that path. The only way to get past was to fight, so the two high rankers—Graphite Edge and Sky Raker—showed what they were really made of, while Haruyuki and Trilead were little more than annoyances to the Enemies.

  When they opened the large door that was the eighth of the ninefold gates and arrived at the large, gloomy hall, the accumulated acceleration time for Haruyuki and Fuko was ninety-five minutes. Just over twenty minutes left until the automatic disconnect safety was activated.

  I guess we’ll have to go back there for a sec and then use another ten points to dive again, Haruyuki thought as they cut across the hall, when two large daises appeared from the darkness ahead. He approached in a near trot and went around to the front of the pedestal.

  The two gleaming black stone pillars were separated by two meters. Silver plates were embedded on their fronts, never to lose their eternal shine. Inscribed on them was the Big Dipper and some Japanese characters, almost never used in the Accelerated World. The plate on the pedestal to the right read KAIYOU, while the one on the left said GYOKKO.

  “These are the pedestals where the fifth and sixth Arcs were enshrined,” Fuko murmured from where she stood next to him, seemingly moved.

  “Yes, Master.” Haruyuki nodded and added, “The armor on the right-hand pedestal was The Destiny, and the sword on the left pedestal was The Infinity. We sealed The Destiny away, but The Infinity is…”

  He looked back at Trilead standing alongside Graph. The young warrior bashfully removed his straight sword from the sheath on his hip and gently raised it with both hands.

  “This is The Infinity, Miss Raker. It is presumptuous of me, but I have taken possession of it. Would you like to hold it?”

  “No, that’s fine. It’s a lovely sword. Thank you for showing it to me, Lead,” Raker answered with a smile and then turned her gaze back to the pedestals. “Sword and…armor, then? They were in the Castle, so I assumed they would be patterned after the three sacred treasures, but it seems not, hmm?”

  “The three sacred treasures? You mean from Japanese mythology?” Haruyuki cocked his head to one side.

  Graphite Edge had snapped his fingers. “That’s my professor, Rekka. You picked up on something good there. Lead and I’ve also talked about whether the Imperial regalia passed down through the Imperial family—the sword Kusanagi, the mirror Yata no Kagami, and the jewel Yasakani no Magatama—might correspond with the fifth, sixth, and seventh of the Seven Arcs in the Accelerated World.”

  “Goodness. But The Infinity is a sword, so even if it does follow from Kusanagi, The Destiny is armor, yes? Isn’t it impossible for it to be patterned after the mirror?” Fuko’
s comment was entirely correct, and Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down.

  But the dual swordsman waggled a finger back and forth. “On the contrary. Before it turned into the Disaster, The Destiny’s true nature was to nullify physical attacks and reflect light-type attacks. More than anything else, it was a silver so bright it dazzled the eye, honestly like a mirror—”

  “Goodness,” Fuko interjected. “You talk as though you’d seen it.”

  Graph cleared his throat deliberately as he muttered evasively, “That is a thing in itself,” before returning to his point. “At any rate. I think reading Destiny as corresponding to Yata no Kagami is not necessarily off base.”

  “S-so then…does that mean the third one, Yasakani no Magatama, corresponds to the seventh Arc…The Fluctuating Light?” The instant Haruyuki voiced this question, the icon on his shoulder, which had been silent for a while, flashed brightly for a mere instant. But it seemed she was not interested in actually saying anything, so he turned his eyes back to Graph.

  The near-black avatar once again did not respond immediately. Silent, he turned slowly and looked at the northern wall of the great hall. It was shrouded in gloom, so Haruyuki couldn’t really see it, but there was the black mouth of a gate there, with a design reminiscent of an ancient temple. The last of the ninefold gates. Unlike the other gates, it had no door, but a chill—rife with ill intent—flowed outward, not allowing any easy crossing of its threshold.

  “The three imperial treasures enshrined in the imperial palace in the real world,” Trilead said abruptly, causing Haruyuki to shift his gaze. The young samurai hung his sword from his left hip once more as he continued evenly, “Of the three, the sword and the mirror are katashiro; put more bluntly, they are replicas. The real Kusanagi is said to be at Atsuta Shrine in Aichi, while Yata no Kagami is supposedly at Ise Shrine in Mire. Yasakani no Magatama is the only one actually set in the Kenji Hall at Fukiage Omiya Palace of the imperial court. Of course, I have not actually seen it.”