Snow White’s Slumber

by Reki Kawahara

  “Now no one will ever have to go through anything like that again, huh?” he said finally.

  “Yes.” Kuroyukihime nodded firmly. “This was the one thing I felt I absolutely had to do while I was a member of the student council…Now, let’s have lunch. We can’t keep everyone waiting forever.”

  “…Right!” As he walked over to rejoin their friends together with Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki’s voice was full of the emotions welling up inside him.

  The seemingly plentiful lunch they had prepared vanished without a trace from the plastic tarp in a mere twenty minutes.

  “Aaah, I’m stuffed.” Both legs stretched out in front of her, Niko patted her stomach, which was so slim you had to wonder where all that food went. “Eating outside’s pretty great. Let’s have a picnic in the park one o’ these days. There’s that big one over by the government building, yeah?”

  “Th-there is, but that’s right in the middle of Leonids territory,” Takumu noted hurriedly.

  “Listen, Professor.” Niko glared at him out of the corner of her eye. “We can cut the net off for a picnic, at least!”

  Utai ran her fingers through the air. UI> IT WOULD BE FUN TO HAVE A PICNIC ON SATURDAY AND ATTACK THE BLUE TERRITORY ALL TOGETHER AFTER EATING.

  “H-hang on, Uiui. That would leave Suginami area empty.” Kuroyukihime was quick to interject, and the other girls laughed cheerfully. Rin Kusakabe’s smiling face was also among them, naturally.

  While on the one hand, he felt another wave of relief at how great everything had turned out, he also felt several thorns stabbing into the depths of his heart. One of these concerns was just as he had blurted out in the confrontation with the White King: the fact that they hadn’t been able to get all of Niko’s Enhanced Armament back. White Cosmos had called the thruster block still in Cerberus’s possession Armor and said it was a “precious hope.” Which meant the Acceleration Research Society’s scheming still wasn’t over. They were probably going to use Cerberus’s Armor to try to produce a new—and maybe even more massive—problem than the ISS kits.

  “You’re not having a good time?” Akira had come to sit next to him at some point, and she offered him a paper cup as she spoke.

  “Oh! No, it’s…Thank you.” He accepted the cup at any rate and took a sip of oolong tea. He brought his upturned face back down and found all eyes suddenly on him, so he unconsciously started to drop his head.

  “Haruyuki, we still have some time. If you have something to say, you can say it, you know?” Kuroyukihime urged.

  He nodded, although he did wonder exactly how much time until what. “Um. The thing that’s just really bothering me…is that we couldn’t get one of Niko’s Enhanced Armaments back.” He looked up at the girl in question, and the Red King merely blinked rapidly in response. This was unexpected, and Haruyuki unconsciously kept going. “I—I mean, Prominence has Territories, too, and all. And you can’t summon Invincible without the thrusters…?”

  Niko exchanged a look with Pard to her left, and then they both looked at Haruyuki. Tugging on one of her red pigtails, Niko said, just the slightest bit apologetically, “Nah, I can.”

  “……What?”

  “Even without the thrusters, I can summon just the other parts.”

  “……Y-you can?” Haruyuki gaped.

  Her slightly contrite look disappeared, and the Red King puffed out her cheeks. “So, like, that knockoff Dusk Taker stole my Enhanced Armament and managed to equip just the four parts without the missile pods, y’know?! Normally, a person’d figure it out then! Listen. Invincible’s an attachment Enhanced Armament with the cockpit block at the center. So long as I got the cockpit, doesn’t matter if the rest is one piece or four pieces!”

  “…R-really…?” Now it wasn’t just his mouth; Haruyuki’s eyes were also opened as wide as they could go.

  “Well, I guess I’ll say thanks for lookin’ out fer me, at least.” Niko’s puffed-out cheeks deflated as she scratched the back of her head. “And it’s true; just ’cause I can equip the four pieces doesn’t mean I can forget about the thrusters or whatever. Just…I think that’s a problem I need to take care of myself.”

  “What—? I’ll help! I mean, you went to the Unlimited Neutral Field to aid us, so we have a responsibility for what happened there.” Haruyuki unconsciously leaned forward toward Niko on the opposite side of the circle he and his friends sat in.

  But the Red King curled her lips up in a faint smile, her face a mix of emotion, and then she looked up at the partly cloudy sky as she spoke slowly. “When that Vise jerk had me captive in that school, I was still conscious, still feelin’ stuff. I mean, it was kinda hazy, but I was there. So I was thinkin’ all kinds o’ stuff when that monster took my Enhanced Armaments one piece after another. Like I was gonna hafta give up being Promi’s LM now. Or like, maybe Pard’ll step up and take the reins as LM. But that wasn’t all. Surprised even me, but I was ready to give up, but also the opposite, too.”

  She dropped her gaze down to her own small hand and clenched her fingers together tightly. “Level-wise, sure, I’m at nine, but my power doesn’t begin to compare with the other kings. Not in battle or in leadership or mentality.” Kuroyukihime opened her mouth to interject, but Niko shook her head lightly with a faint smile still visible. “I was half going with the flow when I became Promi’s LM…I’ve actually always thought that I don’t got the right to call myself the second Red King. In my heart somewhere, I was like, I should walk away from the whole mess before the chrome plating peels off and everyone sees how awkward I really am. But then my Enhanced Armament got stolen. Plus, my back was up against the wall, like maybe this is it—maybe I’m lookin’ at total point loss here. I finally had a reason to throw in the towel, y’know? But I didn’t want to, suddenly. What I really felt was regret. I didn’t want it to end there…Like, I didn’t want to betray Promi, not when it’s come so far after all that chaos three years ago. I mean, the Legion’s stuck with me all this time.”

  Pard pursed her lips tightly together as if to keep the words that bubbled inside her from spilling out. Niko didn’t dare look in her direction, either, but rather looked at Haruyuki and Chiyuri in turn, her hands still clenched into fists on the slender legs that stretched out from her cutoffs.

  “I seriously thank you from the bottom o’ my heart for taking down the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, and gettin’ back three pieces of my Enhanced Armament. But I think I need to spend some time really thinkin’ about what it means that the one piece is still gone. I hafta learn something from this. Just like you’re always doing, Haruyuki. So…don’t panic. As long as my thrusters are out there somewhere in the Accelerated World, I know I’ll get the chance to get ’em back. Until that chance comes along, I’m gonna rebuild myself so I can really call myself Legion Master—and maybe even the Red King. Also, I gotta pay back Metatron somehow, after she disappeared right next to me there.” Having finished this long, resolved speech, Niko gulped down the orange juice in her paper cup, looking embarrassed.

  The thorn that had stabbed at Haruyuki’s heart melted away at her words, but something hot welled up in its place, and he had to blink repeatedly. He didn’t think he could speak, so he nodded his head silently over and over.

  Sitting on her knees to the left, Kuroyukihime rose to her full height and unexpectedly said, “Niko—no, second Red King, Scarlet Rain. I have something to say to you on behalf of a certain friend.”

  The tale she then told was a shocking truth. It hadn’t just been Dusk Taker that the Acceleration Research Society’s necromancer brought back. The memories of the first Red King, Red Rider, had also been revived to produce massive quantities of the ISS kit terminals and had been made to parasitize the kit main body.

  “We fought the Rider that appeared from inside the main body. Naturally, it was not the real Rider I forced to total point loss, but rather a reproduction of his memories…But because of this, now, he himself is the lone true BBK.” Kuroyukihime looked dire
ctly at Niko. “When he was on the verge of disappearing, Rider said to tell his successor his last words…” She paused very briefly. “‘Say thanks to number two. She took over Promi for me. Tell her it’s up to her now.’”

  The second Red King stayed silent.

  And then, abruptly, clear droplets rose in her large reddish-brown eyes, flecked with a green that shone brilliantly depending on the light. Her tears soon spilled over, slid down her freckled cheeks, and fell onto the front of her red T-shirt. Perhaps noticing a little too late, Niko wiped furiously at her eyes, but the large tears just kept falling. Finally, she dropped her hand and pressed her face into the chest of Pard next to her. The Legion deputy, who’d long protected her Master, also blinked repeatedly as she held the girl tightly.

  As he listened to the youthful wailing, tears sprang up in Haruyuki’s own eyes, too. But this time, at least, he wasn’t alone in his sympathetic tears. Chiyuri, Utai, Rin, Fuko, Takumu, Akira, and even Kuroyukihime all had watery eyes as they watched over the second Red King, now finally the official heir after more than two years.

  A minute, then two, then three passed. Lifting a finger to the corner of her eye, Kuroyukihime called out loudly, “Now, it’s getting to be time. It’s starting!”

  Reflexively, Haruyuki glanced at the clock in the lower right of his virtual desktop. The display was clear, unaffected by the tears filling his eyes, and showed 13:59:50. He wondered what exactly was supposed to start at two PM before he remembered. He felt like Kuroyukihime had said something about the student council’s festival exhibit starting at two before they dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field. But no matter what class or what gym it was in, they’d never make it in time now—

  Clang, clang!

  Just as the clock hit two, a light peal of bells rang through the air. But of course, there were no actual bells in the Umesato Junior High school building. Which meant only those connected to the local in-school net could hear this sound via their Neurolinkers. The bell, which sounded very much like Lime Bell’s Choir Chime, rang fourteen times and then stopped—its echo lingering in the air.

  “Guests of the twenty-eighth Umesato Junior High School festival and school students,” the gentle, cadent voice of a female student—probably student council secretary Megumi Wakamiya—announced. “The student council executive will now unveil their project ‘Time.’ Please ensure your Neurolinkers are connected to the network for use at this school. The exhibit area is outside the school buildings. Those of you already outside, please remain there. Those of you inside, please go to a nearby window. Now then, let’s begin.”

  The exhibit area’s outside the school? Haruyuki looked over at Kuroyukihime. But the student council vice president said nothing—a faint smile lingering on her lips. Takumu, Akira, and the others also looked around dubiously, while Niko lifted her face from Pard’s chest as though she hadn’t spent the last ten minutes wailing.

  Fwssh! He felt a refreshing breeze on his skin. Since the Neurolinker’s augmented reality mode could only produce sound and images, this was just a real wind that came along at just the right time. But almost as though it were a signal of some kind, afterward, the back of the tall building he could see beyond the first school building to the south disappeared entirely.

  “Ah!” Hurriedly getting to his feet, Haruyuki started to move toward the railing of the roof, but Kuroyukihime pulled him back.

  “Haruyuki, everyone, it’s easier to see on the other side.”

  “O-other side?” He turned around as he was told. The roof was only ten meters or so wide, so he should have been able to see Oume Highway and the neighborhood of 3-choume Minami Koenji over the railing on the opposite side.

  But the familiar town wasn’t there, either. What spread out before him instead was a ocean of grass as far as the eye could see. It was almost like the Accelerated World’s Grassland stage, but it was dotted with low bushes, and he could see an enormous river about two kilometers to the north. From the location, he assumed it was the Myoshoji River, but that river was at most ten meters across. The one he saw now looked to be a kilometer to the opposite shore.

  They all moved to the railing on the north side and opened their eyes wide in amazement, when, once again, they heard Megumi’s voice.

  “What you are seeing right now is the view from eight thousand years ago in the early Jomon period. At that time, the end of the Musashino Terrace was a shoreline, and what is currently Suginami was in the center of a peninsula that jutted out into an enormous bay.”

  “J-Jomon period?!” Haruyuki cried out in surprise and peered directly down over the railing. The grassy plain started immediately to the north of the animal hutch where Hoo, the northern white-faced owl, lived; Umesato was like a ship floating in a massive green ocean.

  “Master. So does this mean then…that a video of a grassland is being AR–projection mapped over everything outside the school premises?” Takumu asked, showing off his professorial side.

  “Mmm.” Kuroyukihime nodded. “Well, basically, yes.”

  Genre-wise, it resembled the “Koenji Thirty Years Ago” that Haruyuki had unveiled with his own class, but the scale and difficulty were orders of different magnitude. To simply overlay AR images onto the classroom wall, they only had to set up markers in the corners. He had no idea what you would do exactly to overwrite an entire town. Sighing in admiration, he shifted his gaze from east to west, and further explanation came from Megumi.

  “In this era, the Musashino Terrace was an important place for the people who lived in Tokyo in the Jomon period. They built pit-style homes near the water and went hunting and gathering in the vast grasslands. Earthenware and stone tools have been excavated in nearly every area of Suginami, and large-scale ruins have also been discovered in the southern area of the ward.”

  Abruptly, a throaty howl rang out across the grassy plain.

  “Ah! Over there!” Chiyuri jabbed a finger into the air.

  He followed it with his gaze and saw ancient humans with simple lances and bows in their hands, clad in garments made from pelts and coarse cloth, chasing an enormous boar, large enough to be a Wild-class Enemy. They then disappeared, and several cone-shaped residences appeared in the grasslands. In the plaza, women worked together cooking, while children frolicked around them.

  “It was eight thousand years ago. But those children. Looks like they haven’t. Changed so much from us…now,” Rin murmured.

  “I suppose not,” Fuko said. “Actually, it’s not only the Jomon people from eight thousand years ago; even the first Homo sapiens who appeared two hundred fifty thousand years ago were basically the same as modern humans in their brain structure. If you gave those children Neurolinkers and a modern education, they’d probably grow up just like us. Although happy or not is another question.”

  UI> THAT LAST BIT IS VERY YOU, FU.

  Chiyuri and Kuroyukihime and the others laughed at this, with even Niko guffawing loudly, her eyes still swollen and red. As he joined them, Haruyuki quietly puzzled over the meaning of it all.

  This exhibit was indeed amazing. It must have taken an enormous amount of time and effort to prepare. But why the Jomon period? Because it was easier to create a video of grasslands? But he found it hard to believe Kuroyukihime and the student council would choose their topic for a reason like that.

  “Now then, let’s move the era forward a little,” Megumi said, surprising him. The number −8,000 appeared in the lower part of his field of view and began to drop with intense speed.

  The exhibit from then on was nothing short of stunning. All at once, several thousand years passed to bring them to the Yayoi era twenty-three hundred years earlier. Wetland rice farming had begun, and the green plain was transformed into a golden-yellow rice field.

  Seventeen hundred years ago—the Kofun period. The ancient state formed, and the control of the Yamato royal authority reached Musashino. The tools for working the fields and hunting, along with weapons for humans to fight huma
ns, were now metal.

  Fifteen hundred years ago—Asuka to Nara eras. Powerful regional clan chieftains known as kuninomiyakko appeared, and Musashino Province was established in the Kanto region by Chieftain Musashino. This was when the regional name Musashi appeared for the first time.

  A thousand years ago—the Heian era. In Kansai, the nobles exulted in the height of their glory, but in Kanto, the warrior clans—the so-called bandomusha—rose to prominence a little earlier, and large domains took shape. Although the Musashino provincial government had been set up in the city of Fuchu, not so far from Suginami, antagonism among nobles on appointment from the capital and local warriors deepened, eventually leading to the insurgency of Tairo no Masakado, the most well-known of the bandomusha.

  “All we ever study in school is the stuff that happened in the west in the Asuka and Heian eras, but there was stuff happening here, too, huh?” Haruyuki murmured as he watched the warriors cross swords on horseback.

  “You’re totally right.” Takumu tilted his head so his glasses shone in the light. “We live in Tokyo, so we should really take up more of the history of the east in class. For instance, the Musashi Shichito, warrior groups that sprang up here in Musashino, were assigned important positions in the Kamakura bakufu. It wasn’t just Kiyomori and Yoritomo establishing the samurai government; these eastern warriors were in there, too—”