Snow White’s Slumber

by Reki Kawahara

  But the Society’s gambit hadn’t ended there. A beam of red light had come from the main kit as it was on the verge of death: all the destructive Incarnate saved up in its body. The ISS kits themselves had been nothing more than a means to an end. The vast refined and pure dark energy in the eye had been sent off somewhere in the Accelerated World. Somewhere, something was about to happen. Something worse—something even more frightening.

  “…Haruyuki…” Unconsciously, Kuroyukihime gave voice to the name of her only child.

  Haruyuki Arita/Silver Crow had flown off from Midtown Tower in pursuit of the Red King after she was kidnapped by the self-proclaimed vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, Black Vise. She was confident that Crow of all people would bring Niko back to them safely, but Black Vise was an enemy whose depths they still hadn’t plumbed. And it concerned her that the beam of light shot out toward the south side of the Minato Ward Area—the same direction in which Vise had fled.

  Cyan Pile and Lime Bell had both gone after Silver Crow, while Blood Leopard had chased after Argon Array, and she hoped the four would be able to meet up, but—

  Suddenly, Kuroyukihime heard a small thud behind her. Quickly looking back, she saw a small figure on her knees on the chalky floor. The Shrine Maiden of the Conflagration, Ardor Maiden.

  “Uiui!” Fuko called weakly from the floor alongside Kuroyukihime. The sky-colored avatar tried desperately to stand, but having taken a direct Dark Shot hit, her legs were missing from the knee down, and her beloved wheelchair was lying on its side far away. The tips of Kuroyukihime’s hands and feet were similarly shattered, and she too had trouble getting to her feet.

  “I—,” Akira said, the least damaged of the three. As she staggered into an upright position, the flowing water armor covering her body collected at her feet, and she slid to the rear of the floor. She picked up the utterly depleted shrine maiden avatar and made a side trip to grab the wheelchair before returning to them at a walk.

  Having finally succeeded in standing, Kuroyukihime helped Fuko up with the battered remains of her right hand and sat her in the wheelchair.

  “Thanks, Lotus, Curren.” Fuko took Utai from Akira and held her tightly on her lap. The additional Noh mask armor covering the shrine maiden’s face had been released, but there was no light in her round eye lenses. A pseudo Zero Fill—the impact of activating such a large technique, a large-scale, fourth-quadrant destructive Incarnate technique. If it had been an actual Zero Fill, she would have recovered at some point, but given the situation, they faced the possibility now of a negative-will overflow.

  Fuko gently stroked Utai’s face. “You worked so hard, hmm, Uiui? You just rest now…It’s okay. We’ll be right here with you until you open your eyes, all right?”

  Perhaps Utai heard this; to Kuroyukihime, it seemed that the shrine maiden’s white face mask softened slightly. Kuroyukihime and Akira exchanged a faint smile before turning their eyes to the southern end of the floor.

  Utai’s Incarnate attack had ended, but the magma maintained its intense heat, shining a dull red. The ISS kit main body buried in the center of it—or rather, the main body of the main body with all its fleshy armor burned away—had lost its black-pearl luster and was now a hunk of half-burned charcoal. In fact, it had sent all its essential negative Incarnate energy off somewhere, so the black sphere was nothing more than an empty shell. What concerned her now were the words of the re-creation of Red Rider, which had been forced to parasitize the main body.

  It wasn’t an Enemy or an Enhanced Armament. It was probably a duel avatar. If this massive obsidian eyeball known only as the ISS kit main body was in truth a duel avatar, then it—no, he or she—had a real name. And the Burst Linker with this enormous avatar had to exist somewhere in the real world.

  “…Isn’t there a way to confirm the avatar name in the Unlimited Neutral Field?” Kuroyukihime murmured.

  “No.” Akira next to her shook her head slightly. “Don’t think so…I still can’t believe it, either. That that’s a duel avatar like us.”

  “Mm. But there is one way to check that, at least,” Kuroyukihime declared, and Akira and Fuko both nodded.

  If the ISS kit main body, which looked to be on the verge of death, was not an Enemy or an object but rather a duel avatar, then a death marker would appear immediately after it was eliminated. And the value of the Burst Points added to their totals would be another way to make this clear. If, hypothetically, the marker did appear, and they confirmed that the kit main body was a duel avatar, then the rules of the Unlimited Neutral Field would be applied. The kit would regenerate sixty minutes later, but its essential Incarnate energy had been sent off somewhere, so all that would return to the spot was a powerless shell.

  “If it is, then Maiden should be the one to strike the final blow and get the points after pushing it to this place, but…” She turned her eyes to Utai in Fuko’s arms, but the shrine maiden still showed no signs of regaining consciousness.

  Fuko lifted her face and responded with a faint smile. “You finish it, Lotus. I’m sure Maiden would say that herself.”

  “I agree,” Akira assented.

  Kuroyukihime was forced to nod her own agreement. Strength had finally returned to her limbs, and they didn’t have the luxury of mulling this over any further. They hadn’t charged into Midtown Tower to destroy the ISS kit main body, but rather to return to the real world through the portal inside the main body and pull the direct cable out of Niko’s Neurolinker. Kuroyukihime moved to take a step forward with a shattered sword leg.

  And then several things happened in succession.

  First, an extremely intense pressure assaulted them from the south—a half-physical shock wave. Reflexively, she looked to the ISS kit main body, but that was not the source. It was coming from the direction of the red beam on the other side of the walls enclosing the floor.

  “Nngh?!” She was bracing herself before she realized it, wondering if a new enemy had appeared. The source of the pressure was not Midtown Tower where she and her comrades were; the explosive Incarnate energy released by someone somewhere off in the distance had come to them like an air quake. But who on earth could generate that kind of force, enough to rival a volcanic eruption?

  Kuroyukihime and her friends were stunned, albeit only for a moment, and simply stared blankly at the southern wall. So they were just a touch late to notice it.

  They had thought the ISS kit main body was rendered immobile, given that it was on the verge of death, but this half-dead creature suddenly opened its lids. The exposed blood-red eyeball split in the middle, and a viscous black liquid splattered out, throwing a small something toward Kuroyukihime at incredible speed. A small sphere with tiny tentacles protruding like iron probes.

  An ISS kit terminal.

  “Sacchi!!” Fuko shrieked hoarsely.

  Akira brandished her right arm, while Kuroyukihime also reflexively drew the sword of her left hand. But with fifteen centimeters of its length broken off, she was only able to cut away one of the kit’s tentacles.

  In the next instant, jet-black needles plunged one after another into Black Lotus’s cracked chest armor.

  “The Armor of Catastrophe…Mark II…” Haruyuki shook his head back and forth a number of times, as if trying to erase the words that spilled from his own lips.

  The many plots of the Acceleration Research Society—the spread of the ISS kit infection, the artificial metal color plan, the abduction of the Red King, Scarlet Rain—the end point of each was the creation of the Armor. Aqua Current, aka Akira Mimi, had guessed as much a few days earlier.

  But for Haruyuki, it was just too unreal. The first Armor, Chrome Disaster, had been a cursed Enhanced Armament, born at the dawn of the Accelerated World, accumulating power as it was passed down through six Burst Linkers—that last of which had been Haruyuki himself. Going by just the myriad legends that had sprung up, it might have been able to stand shoulder to shoulder with even the super-clas
s Enemies of the Castle, the Four Gods.

  Haruyuki believed no one could produce a thing like that in the span of mere weeks, not even the Acceleration Research Society. But maybe he had only wanted it to be impossible. Not just because he was afraid of a new threat to the Accelerated World but also as a matter of misplaced pride as the former sixth Disaster. However, he could no longer deny that the steel giant towering over him only a dozen or so meters away, emitting its peculiar shriek at the overcast sky, strongly resembled Chrome Disaster—the form-fusing machine and living creature with a sinister aura enveloping its entire body.

  Standing to either side of him, Takumu, Chiyuri, Pard, and Niko appeared to be speechless, overwhelmed by its enormity. They should have been making the decision to fight or flee, but they simply gaped, unable to move a muscle.

  Abruptly, the giant stopped its ferocious roaring and slowly lowered the hands thrust up into the air.

  “Deelloorrrrr…” Groaning like a combustion engine from the previous century, the monster turned to reveal the flowing lines of its upper torso where a massive single eyeball emitted a brilliant, blood-red light. A cold, bottomless hunger, reminiscent of the shining of the ISS kit eye.

  “…Wh-what should we do…?” Chiyuri muttered from Haruyuki’s immediate left.

  Her voice was shaking, but her words broke through his paralysis, and Haruyuki took a deep breath. The cool air of the Twilight stage filled his virtual lungs, and he regained a tiny bit of his power to think. “We have to fight,” he croaked.

  Chiyuri’s slender avatar stiffened, but no word of objection came from her or from his other comrades. They all understood why he had made that decision.

  The original Armor of Catastrophe, Chrome Disaster, had been composed of three elements: the successive wearers of the Armor who had gained power at the same time as they nurtured the item; the Beast, a pseudo intelligence produced from the darkness of the negative Incarnate that accumulated in the Armor; and the Enhanced Armament that became the vessel—the silver armor Destiny, the sixth star, the theta of the Seven Arcs.

  The new Mark II generated by the Acceleration Research Society had a similar three-component structure. First, the wearer: the mysterious metal-color Wolfram Cerberus, produced by Argon Array based on the Mental-Scar Shell Theory. Controlling Cerberus was the red light of unknown origin that had shot down from the sky into the cockpit and taken over Mark II. And the vessel for the body of Mark II was the Enhanced Armament, Invincible, which the Red King, Scarlet Rain, had cultivated over years and with enormous effort.

  If they were to make absolutely sure, they should retreat from that place, rejoin Kuroyukihime and the others at Midtown Tower, and take on the challenge with their full forces. Unfortunately, however, that wasn’t an option. If they let this moment slip by, there was a very good chance that Niko’s Enhanced Armament, which was basically a part of Niko herself, would be lost forever. They had to get Invincible back. After all, Niko was only helping them in their mission that day as a friend, for the sake of Ash Roller/Rin Kusakabe, who she’d only just met, and Aqua Current/Akira Himi, one of Nega Nebulus’s Four Elements.

  Haruyuki glanced to his right. His eyes met Niko’s. Before the Red King could say anything, he declared again, “Right now, we still have a chance to take Invincible back. We’re absolutely going to get it back. We’ll fight him, and we’ll win!”

  The faint air of a wry grin rose up around the Red King as well as Pard, who was across from her. She shrugged her small shoulders. “Well, we’ve come this far. Gotta go the distance, yeah? So listen. For the icing on the cake, we’re gonna send that giant thing flying and set off some huge fireworks.”

  “K.” And that voice was, of course, Pard’s.

  “Got it, Haru,” Takumu said from Haruyuki’s left, as though he’d made up his mind. “If it really is like the Armor of Catastrophe, then the more time passes, the stronger it’ll get. If we’re going to fight, it has to be now.”

  “Allll right!” Chiyuri agreed. “I’m gonna knock it on its butt with one—”

  “No, Chii, your job’s too important,” Takumu interrupted. “You need to step back to the rear.”

  “A-again?! That’s all I ever do!!”

  Haruyuki’s mouth relaxed the tiniest bit beneath his mirrored goggles as the banter between his childhood friends went back and forth.

  This was different from the time he’d tried to fight the Armor’s control all by himself, in his own interior world, during his stint as the sixth Chrome Disaster. Now, unlike then, he was surrounded by comrades he could count on. And although they were currently over three kilometers away, Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Utai, and Akira were also with them in spirit. He was sure of it. Haruyuki clenched his hands into tight fists as if feeling their fighting spirit.

  So far, Mark II had whirled its eyes around very much like a robot with the power turned on for the first time, but now it froze in place. The massive body shifted course another thirty degrees to face Haruyuki and his friends. Venting black steam from the gill-like slits all over the armor, it thundered in a low groan, “Deel…ru-ru-ru-ru-ru…”

  From the inorganic movement and aura, Wolfram Cerberus—supposedly incorporated into the torso—was apparently still unconscious. A forced personality switch had already wrested control of the avatar from the Cerberus I that Haruyuki knew and given it to Cerberus III a few minutes before the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, had awakened. Although the duplicated personality of III—aka Dusk Taker/Seiji Nomi—had managed to steal four of the five components that made up Niko’s Invincible with his special attack, Demonic Commandeer, immediately after that, he had been hit by the beam of red light that shot down from the northern sky and let out a strange scream before suddenly falling silent…or being extinguished.

  If Cerberus I was also still unconscious, then that meant the armor, Mark II, was at the moment being moved by the energy infused by the red light itself. Even the Beast that lived in Chrome Disaster hadn’t been able to control the avatar on its own, so the energy that poured into Mark II was something that defied conjecture in terms of both total amount and base nature. But no matter how great the power it contained, this did not necessarily translate into strength. Now, when it was still newly born and awkward in its movements, they had a chance of victory.

  “He’s got Invincible as the base, so he should be a long-distance type, too,” Haruyuki said quickly. “We charge in and stick to the legs—close off its movement. Chiyu, while we’re stuck to that guy, you fall back inside the building through the south gate.”

  The others nodded immediately, with no further complaint from Chiyuri. She was likely also well aware that Lime Bell’s ability would play the most critical role in taking Invincible back. Though, no—his assumption here was ridiculous. After all, when Dusk Taker stole his flight ability, the one who had gotten his wings back through a mix of unexpected quick wit and sheer effort was Chiyuri. He lightly touched his fingertips to Lime Bell’s arm to communicate his faith in her before calling upon all his mental energy and returning the glare of the iron giant’s single eye.

  The top of Mark II’s head was over six meters from the ground—the size of a Beast-class Enemy—but the only weapons he could see were the large laser guns equipped on either arm. Given that these were the main armaments of Invincible, their power was nothing to laugh at, but there was a charging time of about one second before they fired, so he assumed Mark II wouldn’t be able to manage successive shots. The instant the enemy dropped into an attack stance, they would dash in, take the ground directly under the massive body, and crush the legs.

  Haruyuki and his comrades also had other advantages. Their current location was the central courtyard of a school-type building, about two kilometers southwest of the old Tokyo Tower in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Surrounded on all four sides by the school, transformed into a white temple, the battleground was limited to thirty meters on the short side and fifty on the long—a cramped space for the massive,
long-distance Mark II. If they glued themselves to the enemy and prevented it from firing its main arms while simultaneously continuing to attack, they just might have a chance.

  They would win. Absolutely. And then they could all laugh and high-five once they got back to the real world.

  The enormous single eye of Mark II shone with a reddish-black light in its inner darkness.

  “Here we go!” Takumu shouted, and Haruyuki dropped into a low stance, watching for the moment to charge.

  The giant slowly raised the arms hanging loosely at its sides. At the same time, the countless slits at the base of the main armament and its five-centimeter barrel opened their mouths, and a sound somewhat like a biological energy charge started to echo through the stage. The evening sky and the school building in the background around Mark II’s arms shimmered like a mirage, perhaps because of the heat venting from the slits.

  No…The air itself was becoming unstable. The excessive concentration of high-density energy was distorting the Accelerated World. He’d seen this in the instant before the flame breath of the God Suzaku and the Trisagion of Metatron’s first form. But this was an even larger scale of the warping of time and space.

  It couldn’t be…An attack with power that surpassed even those?

  Abruptly, the new wings on his back, the Enhanced Armament, Metatron Wings, shivered with a ferocity that resembled an electric shock.

  “Gang!” Haruyuki threw out both arms and called out, “Grab on!!”

  This was in total contradiction with the strategy he had only just outlined, but his friends did not so much as hesitate. Instantly, Takumu was holding on tightly to his right arm, Pard his left, and they grabbed onto Chiyuri and Niko with their empty hands to yank them up.

  The darkness that filled Mark II’s gun barrels shone a deep red.

  Deploying the wings on his back in an X formation, Haruyuki kicked off the marble earth with everything he had. The instant his body was off the ground, he released every bit of thrust he was able to generate. The power—enough to make the metal armor of his avatar creak—sent them straight up like a rocket.