“There are other fields above and below the Unlimited Neutral Field? So I guess the lower one’s the normal duel field…There should still be plenty of Burst Linkers fighting there now, though.”
“No.” Metatron shook her head lightly. “Those two fields are completely different spaces from the field we belong to. They are laid upon each other, but there is no way to move between them.”
“Different spaces? What does that mean?” Cocking his head to one side, Haruyuki opened his eyes wide and gasped. Two different worlds. He was sure he’d heard something like this from someone else before.
It was when he had that chance meeting with the Green King, Green Grandé, on the roof of Roppongi Hills Tower. The Green King had spoken about why he went hunting Enemies by himself and distributed the points to other kings without any compensation. He said he couldn’t let this world be closed. Brain Burst—also known as Trial Number Two—couldn’t be abandoned the same way Numbers One and Three had been. The names of those already shuttered worlds were…
“Accel Assault 2038 and…Cosmos Corrupt 2040,” Haruyuki murmured in a voice that was not quite audible.
Metatron reacted with a brief “Oh? You know those names?”
“Y-yeah. A little while ago, another Burst Linker—what you call a little warrior—told me.” The Green King’s definitely no “little warrior,” though, he thought in one corner of his mind.
“Is that so?” The Archangel gave a light nod. “Well then, perhaps that warrior has also been to the Highest Level. But none of that matters now. My hypothesis is that the three fields—AA 2038, CC 2040, and BB 2039 in which we live—were all produced for the same objective.”
“Objective?”
“Think for yourself for once. If you look closely at the three fields, you should be able to also come to this conclusion.”
“R-right. Um.” Taking his eyes off Metatron’s face in profile, Haruyuki stared at the three layers of Tokyo.
But no matter how hard he looked, the upper and lower worlds were essentially completely “closed.” The only point they shared with the world of Brain Burst was the position of the social cameras. If both Accel Assault and Cosmos Corrupt were hidden games like Brain Burst—and that was extremely likely given that an obsessed gamer like Haruyuki hadn’t heard of them—then both had likely produced duel stages with exactly the same structure.
So did that mean that for however many years in real time, there had been other Burst Linkers fighting in a different game world from Haruyuki and his friends in the twenty-three wards of Tokyo? He supposed they would have been Assault Linkers and Corrupt Linkers rather than Burst Linkers, but at any rate, for some reason, they had disappeared. And their memories had most likely been erased when the program was forcefully uninstalled from their Neurolinkers, so they had forgotten that they once fought in a hidden battlefield.
To what end? For what purpose had the developer of the three games given such a cruel sport to children?
Having at some point come to grip Metatron’s hand tightly, Haruyuki continued to focus on the three layered worlds—or more precisely, the one world and the two ruins. And then he realized it abruptly.
The biggest commonality in the three worlds. The fact that, in all of them, the center was wrapped in inky darkness.
“There’s a Castle in Accel Assault and Cosmos Corrupt, too?” Haruyuki said.
“So you finally noticed it then?” Metatron nodded deeply. “The name might have been different in the AA and the CC fields, but just as in our BB field, there exists an isolated space at the center. And in those two worlds as well, the little warriors apparently had this space as their final objective. In which case, that itself is the reason for this world configured in its three layers and why the little warriors and Beings who fight there were generated.”
The pure-white Archangel raised her right hand up high and let her cool, clear voice echo through the infinite darkness.
“The reason for the existence of this space fusing three worlds—if I was to follow the example of you little warriors—the Accelerated World. It is to break into the Castle, a separate world in the center of this world, and the Shrine of the Eight Divines sunken in its depths and reach The Fluctuating Light sealed inside. I am confident of this.”
Even after the long reverberations of Metatron’s speech, like a heavenly proclamation, had disappeared, Haruyuki couldn’t speak.
The Fluctuating Light—TFL. Also known as Youkou, the eta of the Seven Arcs. This was likely the most powerful Enhanced Armament, one that every Burst Linker dreamed of getting ahold of—at most, it was an item within the game, and an assault on the Shrine of the Eight Divines was also nothing more than an item-obtaining event if they charged forward on it. Or rather, that was how Haruyuki had been thinking of it. But Metatron’s words upended his very mind.
TFL itself was the reason that Brain Burst, Accel Assault, and Cosmos Corrupt existed or had existed. This wasn’t on the scale of a requirement to clear the game or anything like it. If she was right, then even level ten was nothing more than a step in that direction. Because the mysterious developer was unable to remove the seal on TFL, they had distributed the game program free of charge to hundreds of children. That was what Metatron was saying.
But there was a large contradiction hidden there. Given that TFL was an obtainable item in the game, it had to have been the developer who made it and placed it in the depths of the Castle. The developer had privileges equivalent to a god, so if they wanted to, they could have moved it from the Castle or even just made another one. There was no real need to make Haruyuki and the other players attack the Castle, was there?
Or was TFL actually fundamentally different from the other six Arcs, even though it was said to be one of the seven? Not an Enhanced Armament or any other kind of item, but rather…? Right, for example…
Haruyuki finally remembered. He himself had been thinking the exact same thing before.
A little over ten days earlier, Haruyuki had charged into the Castle with Utai and met a strange young samurai avatar in the main building. Giving his name as Trilead Tetroxide, he had guided Haruyuki and Utai to the Shrine of the Eight Divines that existed deep underground in the main building. What he saw there was a golden light flickering in the distance in the vast darkness. The glow of the seventh Arc, the Enhanced Armament, The Fluctuating Light.
While he stared at the faintly pulsing light, Haruyuki had been overcome by the sensation that this wasn’t the first time. When he was training in the Incarnate System at the former Tokyo Tower in the Unlimited Neutral Field, as he climbed the wall, free from all other thought, he’d gotten the feeling that someone was talking to him from the other side of a flickering light—a light that was the same color and warmth as TFL.
Someone.
When he was reunited with this light in the depths of the Castle, Haruyuki felt that it was not an Enhanced Armament, but rather a mind. But then his Neurolinker had been disconnected from the global net—and his thoughts cut off. And although he wished he would get inside the Castle again someday and make good on his promise to meet Trilead Tetroxide aka Azure Air again, he still had not managed to do that.
What if what he had felt then was real? That would mean that TFL was not simply an item designed and placed by the developer, but rather something cut off from the world, even as it existed in the center of the Accelerated World? Something that could not be touched even by the hand of the developer—or someone.
“If…,” Haruyuki murmured, staring intently at the ink-black hole that pierced the center of the triple field, “if someone did manage to break through the gates of the Four Gods and into the Shrine of the Eight Divines to touch The Fluctuating Light…What would happen?”
“Do you truly wish to know?”
“Huh?” The unexpected question made him glance at the Archangel. Her long eyelashes were again lowered, and he couldn’t read what she was feeling from her aloof beauty—if Enemies (Beings) did inde
ed have feelings, that was.
“………”
He paused briefly before nodding deeply. “I do. Even if it’s the end of the world. I haven’t fought with the Black King this long to stop and stand still. I want to keep moving forward.”
When he gave voice to this thought, he belatedly realized what it indicated. If reaching TFL was the reason for the existence of Brain Burst, then someone doing that might mean they finished the game, and the Accelerated World would also vanish. If that was to happen, the time of Haruyuki Arita, who lived in the real world, would continue to flow as always, but that wasn’t necessarily the case for Metatron. For her, the end of the game might be the same as death. Unconsciously, Haruyuki squeezed the hand still in his.
Perhaps picking up his thoughts through the palms of their touching hands, the Archangel murmured quietly, “I too wish to know. The meaning of the seventy-one million five hundred ninety-two thousand three hundred nineteen hours from the time I awoke in this world until now. Even if…it means the extinction of my existence in exchange.”
“…Metatron…” Haruyuki could do nothing more than say her name in a strained voice.
The Accelerated World had been born in 2039. Eight years had passed since. That alone felt like a very long time to Haruyuki, but living in the Accelerated World as she did, Metatron had passed through a thousand times that time—eight thousand years. A year was about 8,760 hours, so eight thousand times that was just as Metatron said, a little over 70 million hours. A length of time that was basically equivalent to eternity.
Dropping his eyes down to the triple galaxy glittering silently below, he gave voice to the words that rose up from the depths of his heart. “Um, so I promised to be your servant for a thousand years, right? So…I wish you wouldn’t disappear before I can keep that promise…I guess…”
“…You say such foolish things, as always. You haven’t even broken through the outer gates of the Castle yet; you won’t be able to conquer the Shrine of the Eight Divines in a mere thousand years. I do not need you to tell me that you will be serving me for a thousand years.” After this cold utterance, Metatron softened her tone the slightest bit. “However, earlier, you submitted what I requested. Thus, I shall also make my gift.”
“Huh?” What was she going to give him? Haruyuki felt the stirrings of a worldly desire, while Metatron led his gaze downward.
“The technique to defeat that pseudo-Being.”
These words instantly brought him back to reality, and he unconsciously stiffened his shoulders. It wasn’t as though he’d forgotten, but the actual body of Silver Crow frozen in the sky above the Minato Ward Area of the Unlimited Neutral Field was about to take a direct hit from the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II’s nihilistic laser. It seemed that time was essentially stopped here in the Highest Level, but a half second after he returned to what Metatron called the Mean Level, the jet-black great lance would slam into him.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but…in that situation, how…?” he asked timidly.
“That is truly a disgusting and abominable object, but the amount of empty energy it contains is so great that even I am barely able to measure it,” Metatron replied, sounding slightly sterner. “If you err in your response, you will be instantly disassembled along with your armor.”
“D-disassembled…How can I not be…?”
“You must destroy it with a force of the opposite affiliation, of course. The void attack launched by the pseudo-Being and the body itself below that.”
“Opposite…affiliation…”
In the Accelerated World, the nihilistic (dark) affiliation was paired with the light affiliation. And Haruyuki had the long-distance, light Incarnate technique, Light Javelin. But he was still developing that, so it took a while to activate, and the precision of the sight was still soft. And more than anything else, it unfortunately did not have the power nor the range to pierce the body in the distance on top of erasing the nihilistic laser fired from Mark II’s main guns.
“Um. I don’t want to give up before I’ve even started, but with the techniques I have now, that kind of power— To start with, I don’t think I could even fire before I took that direct hit…,” Haruyuki admitted quietly, hanging his head, and his hand, still caught in Metatron’s, was squeezed with a merciless force. He didn’t have a health gauge on the Highest Level, so he assumed he wasn’t taking damage, but even so, he reflexively cried out in pain. “Ow-ow-ow-ow!”
The mighty Archangel arched her beautiful eyebrows above still-closed eyelids and snapped, “Listen to me. You are the servant of one of the Four Saints, so refrain from such fainthearted words and deeds. I say it is possible, so it is indeed possible!”
“O-okay.”
This is like getting chewed out by Kuroyukihime now. He gave himself over to these sorts of feelings, now at this late stage, while Metatron tugged on his hand again and turned them ninety degrees to the right. At the same time, she shifted her own position to face him once again.
Then she wordlessly turned her right palm out and offered it to him, so Haruyuki also nervously brought his left up to press on the slender hand. Their palms were now connected, but Metatron stayed ensconced in silence. If this were folk-dancing practice in gym class, this is when “Turkey in the Straw” would have played, but of course, the dark world remained replete with silence.
After nearly ten seconds had passed in Haruyuki’s subjective time, Metatron finally spoke. “I am aware that you currently do not have the power to destroy that pseudo-Being. And the power of the wings I have lent you, Ektenia, also cannot pierce that dense void. That technique was originally one for broad-range annihilation that my first form releases simultaneously from my many wings.”
“R-right. But it was plenty strong. It’s helped me out a bunch of times. Tha—”
“I’m telling you it is not that impressive!” the eight-thousand-year-old Legend-class Enemy Haruyuki told him indignantly, then paused briefly before continuing. “I am in rapport with you now through my wings. My actual self in the Mean Level has already returned to the deepest stratum of my domain, so I am not able to come to your battleground. But there exists a means of manifesting my power through your body.”
“Through me…Your power?”
“This is now the only way to pierce that nothingness and destroy the enemy.”
Metatron’s speech made Haruyuki remember once more the days he had passed at the old Tokyo Tower. Still holding her hand, he pulled his head back and asked timidly, “Um, are we maybe going to do some kind of training here or something?”
“I suppose we might, if you so desire. However, if we stay too long in this Highest Level, it will become difficult to return to the lower level. In fact, three thousand years or so ago, I lost sight of the way back and had some bit of trouble myself.”
“S-so no training then! …But then what exactly is this way?” Haruyuki cocked his head to one side, and before his eyes, the Archangel threw her slender body back and unfurled her double wings.
“Listen to me, little warrior. On the Highest Level, the concept of ‘distance’ is meaningless. Thus, it is possible for us two to touch like this, despite the fact that we are far apart on the Mean Level; for us to have this overview of all three fields; and to even reference memories. But there still exists a definite ‘gap’ between you and me. That is the movement of the mind to protect and maintain the very existence of our selves…This is the most primordial energy of what you little ones call the Incarnate System.”
“The Incarnate…source…” Although what Metatron was saying was difficult, he also felt like he understood it instinctively.
A firmly focused imagination overwrote phenomena. That was the basic gist of the Incarnate System. But most likely, the majority of Burst Linkers were always imagining something without realizing it themselves: a wall to protect their own heart. A hard shell built up around the soft, easily hurt soul…The duel avatar was produced with mental scars as the mold. Pu
t another way, it was the armor Burst Linkers produced and wrapped around themselves—a weapon.
Haruyuki had thought the Brain Burst program created the duel avatars. That the night of the day you installed the program, it called up the trauma in your heart in the form of a nightmare and went ahead and designed your avatar from that image. But that might not actually have been the case. Maybe the Burst Linkers themselves strongly imagined a presence in the dream that would protect them and made that incarnate.
In which case, the duel avatar–birth process was the Incarnate System itself. Every Burst Linker used Incarnate in the first moment of becoming a Burst Linker. Those wishing for power in their own hands were blue types; those wishing for power to reach the distance were red types. Those wishing for the power to protect themselves and their comrades were green types; while those who desperately wanted not power, but a hard shell, were metal colors. And forever after that, without being aware of it, they all worked to maintain the form of their duel avatars with the power of Incarnate.
“Metatron.” Haruyuki looked at the beautiful angel whose hands were connected with his own. “You said you can hear the sound of the Incarnate System, right? So then…the sound of me protecting my heart is probably…super-earsplitting?”
“Why would you think that?”
“…I’m one of the few metal colors in the Accelerated World—I have metal armor. And that’s proof I want to protect my heart much more strongly than other people. That I don’t want to defeat enemies or save my comrades…I just want to wrap my own self up in a hard shell. There’s no way this sound of mine isn’t despicable.”
Haruyuki thought she would definitely get mad at him over this excessively self-deprecating line. But the Archangel replied without changing her tone or expression.
Snow White’s Slumber Page 8
