Snow White’s Slumber

by Reki Kawahara

  Copyright

  ACCEL WORLD, Volume 16

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Jocelyne Allen

  Cover art by HIMA

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ACCEL WORLD Vol. 16

  © REKI KAWAHARA 2014

  First published in Japan in 2014 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2018 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kawahara, Reki, author. | HIMA (Comic book artist) illustrator. | Beepee, designer. | Allen, Jocelyne, 1974– translator.

  Title: Accel World / Reki Kawahara ; illustrations, HIMA ; design, bee-pee ; translation by Jocelyne Allen.

  Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2014–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2014025099 | ISBN 9780316376730 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296366 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296373 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296380 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296397 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296403 (v. 6 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316358194 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316317610 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316502702 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316466059 (v. 10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316466066 (v. 11 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316466073 (v. 12 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975300067 (v. 13 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975327231 (v. 14 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975327255 (v. 15 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975327279 (v. 16 : pbk.)

  Subjects: CYAC: Science fiction. | Virtual reality—Fiction. | Fantasy.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K1755Kaw 2014 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2014025099

  ISBNs: 978-1-9753-2727-9 (paperback)

  978-1-9753-2728-6 (ebook)

  E3-20181108-JV-NF-ORI

  1

  A single, straight line tore through the eternal evening sky. The inky beam shot forth from the upper floors of Tokyo Midtown Tower parallel with the ground, passed overhead full strength, and disappeared into the distant northeastern sky.

  What would happen if that beam reached the end of the Accelerated World? Would it disappear without a sound? Cause an enormous explosion? Tear a hole in the very fabric of the world?

  As she considered this question, the Burst Linker Magenta Scissor—aka Rui Odagiri—returned her gaze to the source of the beam.

  She was sitting in the plaza in the middle of Akasaka Sakas, a large-scale commercial facility in Minato Ward Area No. 1. At Midtown Tower, some eight hundred meters to the southwest, the Black Legion was fighting the ISS kit main body. She couldn’t actually see the scene of the battle, but she felt the waves of rage from the main kit that came through the terminal, parasitizing her chest armor.

  …No. This rage and hatred the main kit generated had been produced bit by bit in the hearts of kit users like Rui. So some percentage of this black undulation could be said to have originally been Rui’s own.

  The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle once explained the difference between hatred and anger, saying that anger is born out of poor treatment of oneself or something that includes oneself. Anger is accompanied by pain and will heal someday if given time. Hatred, however, is born from some cause not directly connected with oneself. Thus, hatred is not accompanied by pain, and therefore, will not be healed by time.

  Rui was angry with the Burst Linkers who persecuted the weak with their power, and she hated the system of the Accelerated World that allowed this.

  A duel avatar was supposedly born with the player’s mental trauma as the mold, which was why there was an infinite variety of forms and abilities. But everyone was supposed to have the same potential. This, however, had turned out to be rubbish. Every single Burst Linker knew there was an absolute unfairness in a duel avatar’s strength or appearance. The majority just pretended they couldn’t see it.

  For Rui, the members of the Black Legion, Nega Nebulus—the Black King and the Four Elements that were the Legion’s executive power in particular—were symbols of the unfairness of the Accelerated World. Their dashing, beautiful, pure appearances. Fighting abilities such that their avatars were crowned with nicknames. They rose up in revolt against the six major Legions, took on the challenge of the impregnable Castle, and although the Legion was destroyed once, they rose up again—even these legends could be read as signs that they were “chosen ones.”

  Rui had never fought the Black King nor the Four Elements. So then, according to Aristotle, what she felt toward them was not anger, but rather hatred. A feeling akin to a curse that no amount of time could ever resolve.

  But today, Rui had finally tangled with this Legion. With thirteen like-minded ISS kit users, she had waited for them in the Unlimited Neutral Field and dared to fight them, mustering up every bit of strength she had.

  And she’d lost. To be honest, it hadn’t even been close.

  The ISS kit gave its users the close-range technique Dark Blow and the long-distance technique Dark Shot. Given that both were almighty void-element Incarnate techniques, they were impossible to defend against with normal means. Once you mastered these two powers, inequality was erased in the realm of battle power. Powerless duel avatars, seemingly born to be prey for the strong, were now able to fight on a level equal to or greater than that of the members of the Legions of the Seven Kings of Pure Color. That was how it was supposed to be.

  But the power of the Black King and the Four Elements far surpassed Rui’s expectations. The Dark Blow was evaded, and the Dark Shot was deflected; she’d been unable to land even a single real blow.

  It hadn’t been just the executives, either. The three younger members of Nega Nebulus—Silver Crow, Lime Bell, and Cyan Pile—hadn’t so much as flinched at taking on the kit users, who beat them in number if nothing else and had fought ferociously, even as they grew more and more battered. Cyan Pile and his Incarnate sword, presumably kneaded into existence by the avatar himself now that he had escaped from the kit’s control, had even managed to cut down Rui’s Remote Cut, an ability she had absolute confidence in against a close-range avatar.

  And further shocking to her was the fact that Silver Crow had tried to use his own body as a shield to defend against the laser attack of the massive Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron when it had suddenly charged onto the battlefield. He hadn’t just provided cover for the Black Legion but also for Rui’s group.

  Before she knew it, Rui was stepping into the sea of flames produced by the aftermath of the laser to hold Crow up. The order to d
estroy the small duel avatar came at her relentlessly from the ISS kit parasitizing her chest, threatening to rip her in two, but even so, Rui had kept her grip on Crow’s shoulders. In that instant, she understood she had lost.

  …And yet. Perhaps she’d started to sense it would come to this a few days earlier. Ever since she had fought Silver Crow and lost when he tried to defend the territory-less ephemeral Legion, Petit Paquet, in Setagaya Area.

  The jet-black beam that had cut across the sky above her head a few seconds before was the original Dark Shot, fired by the ISS kit main body tucked away at the top of Midtown Tower. Its power was tens of times greater than the terminal’s. Any duel avatar it hit would be instantly destroyed; it might have been the most powerful attack in the Accelerated World.

  But the Black King and the others wouldn’t lose. Through the terminal biting into her chest, Rui felt not only the main kit’s rage and hatred, but also a deep fear. She had thought the kit was nothing more than a soulless lump of malice, but it was trembling with fear—with terror.

  So was there no meaning to what I did in the end? Did I only invite confusion into the Accelerated World—simply spread hatred and sadness?

  Rui looked back again as she asked herself these questions. The thirteen Burst Linkers who she had given—no, parasitized with—the kits were sitting slumped over, as if they had exhausted their strength.

  There was a portal in the broadcast building that rose up to the rear of the Sakas plaza, but after walking the kilometer or so from Midtown Tower, she had decided to watch over the Black Legion’s battle rather than leave right away. But her comrades’ eyes were vacant, dull; they hadn’t even reacted to the beam shooting by directly overhead.

  As payment for the excessive power it granted, the ISS kit took your heart. Emotions became dulled, and soon, users were spurred on by nothing but a mechanical anger and hatred. The truly frightening part was that the kit’s effects extended to the flesh-and-blood body. Symptoms weren’t quite as bad as when the user was accelerated, but they were still there—users became quick to anger and prone to depression.

  Rui had always been relatively unemotional, and she appeared to have a resistance to the interference, but her comrades had to have changed so much personality-wise that they wouldn’t have been able to hide it from those around them. Perhaps some had even lost friends because of it. The majority had accepted the kit out of their own desire, but for the others, Rui had cut their avatar armor open with her scissors and forcefully parasitized them. She’d convinced herself that this was for their own benefit. That a little interference from the kit was not that big a deal if the alternative was the strong taking their points and banishing them from the Accelerated World as simple prey.

  But in the battle that day, Rui had been made to see the absolute limit of the ISS kits—of the power she had been “given.” Dark Blow and Dark Shot were powerful techniques. But they didn’t go so far as to make the hearts of those who used them strong. In fact, what power their hearts possessed before they accepted the kits had probably been whittled away.

  So Rui knew that she and her group could never defeat Nega Nebulus.

  It wasn’t that the Black King and the Four Elements had been strong right from the get-go. They had learned from defeat and expended an enormous amount of effort, seeking out and refining the power within themselves. Of course, that inequality known as randomness no doubt loved them, as well. But that was a trivial element now that they had become high rankers. Put another way, every Burst Linker was given the chance to become as strong as they wished. Just like Silver Crow, who was currently on that path of self-improvement.

  Supposedly the only perfect flying type in the Accelerated World, she had thought that fate—that the BB system—loved him more than anyone. But that probably wasn’t true. Crow was an irregular duel avatar; he couldn’t do anything other than fly. He had to have encountered all kinds of setbacks before he came up with attack strategies that used his flight power. And yet, he hadn’t lost heart. He believed in the avatar his own heart had produced, had single-mindedly refined his lone power, and had gained the strength to squarely face even a Legend-class Enemy.

  Cyan Pile was the same. A born contradiction—a close-range type with a midrange piercing weapon—he had slammed into any number of walls and overcome them instead of giving up, and now, he was finally able to draw his sword proudly from the depths of his own heart. Rui’s scissors had cut into his sword over a hundred times, but she hadn’t been able to shatter it.

  Their strength was proof that the Black King and her executives were giving them proper guidance. It also proved the strength of the Black King and her executives themselves. They were fundamentally different from Rui and the way she tried to gain comrades and realize her hopes with the borrowed power of the ISS kit. If the kit main body was destroyed, and all the users’ terminals also disappeared, would everything Rui had done from the time she became a Burst Linker—the things she had seen and thought—lose all meaning? Would the fact that she had longed for a transient equality in the Accelerated World become nothing more than a foolish delusion?

  …No. She was the one who got to decide that. And even in the midst of defeat, loss, and error, she could find something that had value. That shiny crow would almost certainly tell her that.

  “…Avo,” Rui called in a quiet voice.

  The small sphere lying immediately beside her—Avocado Avoider’s true form—responded with a faint “Krrrr.” This curiously shaped avatar retained more of his self than any of her other comrades, likely for reasons other than Rui’s.

  She picked him up with both hands and set him on her knees. “Let’s go see them again someday. To find out the meaning of what we’ve done—of what we tried to do.”

  And then, Rui waited silently for the moment when the ISS kit main body was destroyed.

  2

  “What…on earth…?”

  Kuroyukihime’s voice was hoarse as she struggled to push herself up on exhausted arms.

  On the southern edge of the sprawling forty-fifth story of Tokyo Midtown Tower, the marble floor was melting into a bright-red pool of magma ten meters across. Half sunken into that pool, with its jetting flames and powerful heat, was an ink-black ball. Cracked and scorched by the magma, this object was the root of the evil behind the large-scale chaos in the Accelerated World—the ISS kit main body.

  The eyeball-shaped thing had repeatedly fired terrifyingly powerful Dark Blows and Dark Shots and pushed Kuroyukihime and her companions to the edge of annihilation. But the magma produced by Utai Shinomiya/Ardor Maiden’s destructive Incarnate had gutted the mysterious monolith and nearly melted it into nothingness. Its lids were more than half-closed, and the pupil had lost its light; the fleshy armor that had protected the eyeball was also burned away. If it had had a visible health gauge, there would have only been a few pixels left in it.

  But Kuroyukihime and the similarly prone Fuko Kurasaki/Sky Raker and Akira Himi/Aqua Current had taken their eyes off this melting body. Instead, they stared at the utterly unremarkable white wall off to the right. In particular, at a single spot on that wall, blackened as though with soot.

  Mere seconds before, a narrow shaft of light had shot off from the kit body, pierced the wall—or more precisely, slipped through it—and disappeared off to the south. It hadn’t been an attack; rather, it appeared to have been a beam for the simple purpose of transmitting information. Whatever it was, the instant Kuroyukihime saw that red line, her entire body had grown colder than ice, numb to all sensation.

  It had been seven years since she had come into this world as Black Lotus. During that time, she had repeatedly been faced with phenomena that far surpassed her comprehension and beings so fearful that they caused her to freeze in terror. But this transmission shooting from the ISS kit main body—not even three seconds long—made Kuroyukihime shiver with a fear greater than anything else she had ever encountered.

  Malice. That beam transmitted to
an unknown endpoint the vast malice accumulated within the ISS kit main body. The pure negative Incarnate energy, refined to hurt, torment, and destroy all Burst Linkers.

  The Incarnate System was the strongest force in the fighting game Brain Burst. An imagination honed to the limit overwrote every kind of phenomenon and brought about a myriad of miracles. But given that it was still a system, the logic had its restrictions.

  One: A player could not acquire Incarnate techniques in opposition to their avatar’s affinity.

  Two: The more powerful the technique, the fiercer the exhaustion it brought about.

  Three: Misuse would bathe the player’s heart in darkness, causing a loss of self…

  In other words, there was a limit to the amount of Incarnate energy a single Burst Linker could produce. Even if you sought a power great enough to destroy the entire Accelerated World, the capacity of an individual mind wouldn’t be able to withstand that level of energy.

  As far as Kuroyukihime knew, the most powerful destructive Incarnate user was Transient Eternity (aka the White King, White Cosmos), but even she would have to carry out dozens of attacks over the span of a half minute or so in order to destroy even a third of a duel stage—a power that barely compared to Archangel Metatron’s laser attack, which had decimated that same area with a single shot. Basically, that was the limit of an individual’s Incarnate technique.

  The Acceleration Research Society had smashed that limit with a new system, the ISS kits. By giving dozens of Burst Linkers the same Incarnate techniques, collecting and fusing in the kit main body the rage and hatred each of them held in their hearts, the Society had produced a destructive Incarnate energy on a scale previously unseen in the Accelerated World. The fact that the battle with the main kit had ground down Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Akira to the point of being essentially helpless now was proof of how fearsome this power truly was. It would have been utterly impossible for them to mitigate that Dark Shot again. Fortunately, they had just barely managed to protect Utai to the rear so her Dance of Flames could destroy the kit main body.