The Binary Stars of Destiny

by Reki Kawahara

  Instead of vibrating the propulsive objects called metallic fins with the numerical energy known as the special-attack gauge—he had to flap the wings created by his own heart, flap them with the power of the imagination, and fly.

  When she was first teaching Haruyuki the Incarnate System at the top of the old Tokyo Tower, Fuko had once said, “Perhaps you are the one who will be able to fly one day with Incarnate alone. But that will probably take a very long time.”

  As a Burst Linker and as an Incarnate user, Haruyuki was still just a little chick. He didn’t have anywhere near enough training or experience. But if he was going to fly, now was the time. If he couldn’t fly now, then for what purpose had he been born with the name Silver Crow?

  The image. He had to imagine it. The meaning of flying itself. The meaning of kicking at the ground and aiming for the sky.

  In Haruyuki’s view, a vision of a small scops owl danced up, flapping white wings.

  “Fly, Crow!!” Kuroyukihime to his right.

  “Fly, Corvus!!” Fuko to his left.

  He melted all this together into a single silver image, sending it racing through his body before concentrating it between his shoulder blades. And then Haruyuki saw with his mind’s eye. He saw the ten metal fins extending from Silver Crow’s back shine dazzlingly and change form, overwritten into real wings resembling those of a bird of prey.

  “Unh…ah…aaaaaaaah!!” As Haruyuki howled, the last pixel of his special-attack gauge was consumed. But the propulsive force accelerating his whole body into the sky did not disappear.

  Haruyuki flapped with all his might the wings shining a dazzling silver and called out at the top of his lungs the name of the new Incarnate technique that came rising up from the depths of his heart.

  “Light…speed!!”

  Pwaan! His entire field of view was enveloped in the dazzle of silver. He approached the vision of the owl flying slightly ahead of him, touched it, became one with it. Cradling the other two duel avatars, Haruyuki flew with an incredible acceleration he had never felt before. The thick clouds of the Demon City stage drew closer in the blink of an eye, and then he was plunging through them without a hint of resistance.

  His view was painted over with a thick gray. But soon, a crimson light shone below. Suzaku was chasing after them even now. The pace of the Enemy’s acceleration was clearly increasing. The two flying bodies of different sizes pierced the sky of the Accelerated World, carving out trajectories of silver and red.

  A few seconds later, his field of view suddenly cleared.

  The limitless sky, an azure so blue it almost sucked him in. A sea of snow-white clouds below, stretching out into the distance. He couldn’t even imagine how many hundreds—or thousands—of meters up they were. But Haruyuki flapped his silver wings even harder.

  Bompf! An enormous hole opened up in the sea of clouds beneath them. Appearing from within it was the enormous bird, shrouded in flames that burned even hotter. The God Suzaku was burning up anything and everything for the sake of the intruders who had not once, but twice disturbed its territory. Its fierce will spilled out from its lone eye as it charged forward at the same speed as Haruyuki flying with the power of the Incarnate.

  Exactly what I was hoping for! Come on!! Haruyuki howled in his mind and mustered every bit of his imagination to beat the silver wings.

  The color of their surroundings gradually began to change. From azure to ultramarine, and then to black. Beyond them, several small points of light glittered. Stars. And far off to the right ahead of them in the sky, he noticed a thin silver thread stretching straight up, shining. That was…Hermes’ Cord. The low-earth-orbit space elevator that circled the Accelerated World at a super-high altitude. It was just moving into the Tokyo area.

  Finally, the speed of their ascent gradually began to falter. It wasn’t that Haruyuki’s Incarnate was weakening; it was that his “wings” had reached their maximum altitude. No matter how he might try to overwrite with his imagination, the propulsive mechanisms extending from Haruyuki’s back were wings, and they’d had their limit. Without air, they could not fly. And he was basically in space.

  The crimson light chasing them from below abruptly grew weaker. At the same time, the enormous bird’s rage-filled roar shook the thin air.

  Haruyuki stopped flapping and he looked down as they continued to gently ascend through momentum alone. The flames eternally blanketing the body of the God Suzaku, who had been right on their tail up until that point, had almost entirely disappeared because of the little oxygen in the air around them. The exposed, sleek red feathers began to frost at the tips.

  “This is our chance!” Kuroyukihime suddenly shouted.

  “Crow, let go! Raker, you can fly, right?!”

  When Haruyuki reflexively opened his arms, the jet-black and sky-blue avatars drifted gently in what amounted to a zero-gravity world.

  “Of course, Lotus!” Fuko nodded sharply and turned her back to Kuroyukihime.

  “Good!” Black Lotus grabbed hold of Sky Raker’s back with both legs. Raker whirled her body around, and blue light burned at the exhaust port of the Enhanced Armament, now recharged to some degree.

  “Here we go!!” Fuko announced briefly, and without hesitation went full throttle with the booster.

  Trailing a long streak of pale flames, the two avatars joined together as one charged fiercely toward the God Suzaku cruising below them. Unlike Haruyuki’s wings, Sky Raker’s Gale Thruster was an energy-injection-type propulsive mechanism. Only she could fly in space where there was no air.

  Left eye burning with fearsome rage, Suzaku spread its half-frozen wings to greet the two avatars with an attack. But no matter how it flapped, its massive body didn’t move. It gave up on advancing and opened its beak to launch its flame breath, but it seemed that the warm-up took more effort than it had on the ground.

  “Too late!!” Kuroyukihime shouted, opening wide the swords of both arms from her position on Fuko’s back, and then drew them back into a downward V. Haruyuki had never seen this movement before. Both swords were enveloped in a whitish-blue light reminiscent of a distant star.

  “Haaaaaaaaaah!” Fierce battle cry surging from her throat, the aura on her arms focused into several points of light. Eight on each sword for a total of sixteen.

  With the collection of lights from an enormous constellation trailing her, Kuroyukihime called out in a voice so clear it threatened to echo to the ends of the universe, “Star Burst…Stream!!”

  Both swords shot out so fast they became invisible to the naked eye as they alternated. With each blow, a single, pale, shining star was released, becoming a shooting star that slammed into Suzaku. Each time, the sound of the impact was enormous, shaking Haruyuki’s body.

  Each time a falling star, riding Sky Raker’s incredible acceleration, crashed into it, the God shrieked. The massive body of the Enemy had lost its armor of flames, and any number of red feathers and damage effects flew off and scattered into the air. Displayed in Haruyuki’s field of view, Suzaku’s five-tier health gauge was carved away with such intensity that he almost doubted his eyes.

  “Hnnngaaaaaaaah!!” Kuroyukihime’s swords glittered and flashed nonstop to launch the shooting stars created by her Incarnate, a celestial machine gun. Ten shots. Eleven. Several holes had already been gouged out of Suzaku’s wings, and its chest and tail were also torn up here and there. But the flames of rage burning in its left eye did not disappear. Even as it took this massive damage, it opened its beak and tried to force out its flame breath.

  “Aaah!” Haruyuki reflexively howled, and drew his right arm back. The image of light collected from all over his body contracted into a single point, and then changed into a lance of light—and shot forward.

  “Laser Lance!!”

  The lance became a beam of light and raced through space, overtaking Kuroyukihime on the right to hit Suzaku’s remaining eye precisely on target.

  The God faltered on the verge of breathing out i
ts flames, and in that single-second opening, Kuroyukihime released the last star—the sixteenth—with a roar. Drawing out a tail like a comet, the star fell from the heavens and crashed into the inside of Suzaku’s mouth, causing the white-hot flame breath there to explode.

  Haruyuki’s view was filled with red light.

  An unbelievably enormous ball of flames—a second sun—was born, and a surge of overwhelming energy expanded in all directions.

  Haruyuki intently grabbed with outstretched hands the bodies of Kuroyukihime and Fuko, blown backward by the blast. He held them to his sides once more, caught the energy stream with the wings on his back, and turned the force into thrust. This phenomenon seemed like nothing other than Suzaku itself exploding, but the last bar of the Enemy’s health gauge was still about half-full. They couldn’t get reckless and get too close.

  Haruyuki carved out a large arc as he circled the fireball and entered a downward course toward the earth’s surface.

  The red light gradually weakened, and the figure of the large bird on the verge of death was revealed. It had already lost the menacing air of a God; it lifelessly flapped its beaten and battered wings.

  If we’re going to defeat it, now’s the time?! Haruyuki thought fleetingly.

  But then a strange light cloaked Suzaku’s massive frame—a tricolored aura of white, blue, and black. Haruyuki opened his eyes wide, wondering just what this was, and then something even more supernatural happened. Suzaku’s injuries were healed from the outside in before his eyes. And its health gauge, down 90 percent, suddenly started to recover.

  “Honestly. That the support of the other Gods would reach even this far into space,” Kuroyukihime murmured, and he finally remembered.

  The four super-level Enemies that guarded the four gates to the Castle were linked to one another. Even if one were attacked and damaged, as long as the other three were not engaged in battle, they would endlessly heal the injured one with their support abilities.

  “It’s pointless to chase this too far, Corvus.”

  Haruyuki nodded at Fuko’s words. Their current objective was not to defeat Suzaku but to get out of its territory. He flapped the wings still wrapped in silver overlay to catch the thin air and move straight downward. The surrounding darkness shifted before his eyes to ultramarine and then a clear azure.

  They finally approached the thick clouds and flew in headfirst. He broke through the gray veil to the sky of the Demon City stage. Far below, he could see the enormous palace surrounded by a circle of walls and the bridge stretching straight out from the south gate. He caught sight of three tiny figures waving their hands wildly at the southern end of the bridge.

  A hundred meters above the bridge, he changed direction and moved into a gentle feetfirst glide. Flapping his wings carefully to avoid popping out over either side of the bridge, he headed for the ground as quickly as possible. The patterned tile of the surface of the bridge rose up, and the resolution increased.

  Finally, the tips of the toes of Haruyuki, Kuroyukihime, and Fuko simultaneously touched the surface of the bridge. The place they landed was one meter from the southern end of the large bridge—the border of the territory of the God Suzaku.

  Before them were the grinning faces of their three friends. The small shrine maiden standing on the right had apparently also been healed with Chiyuri’s special attack; Ardor Maiden was stretching out a completely restored left arm alongside her right.

  Haruyuki, Kuroyukihime, and Fuko took one step, two, and then three toward them and left the bridge.

  “Welcome back!” Takumu, Chiyuri, and Utai said in unison.

  “We’re home.” Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Haruyuki also brought their voices together to speak as one. And then they each took a final step forward.

  Haruyuki and Takumu. Kuroyukihime and Chiyuri. And Fuko and Utai. They all hugged one another hard. At the same time, a pillar of red light shot down from the sky above the altar in the distance and was sucked into the floor there, disappearing.

  In that instant, the twin missions to rescue Ardor Maiden and escape the Castle, executed by all members of the Black Legion, Nega Nebulus, were completed.

  11

  At the same time as his overlay disappeared, Haruyuki’s wings turned back into his original metal fins. These automatically folded up neatly and were tucked away in a protruding cover. After silently offering words of thanks to his own wings, Haruyuki looked again at the faces of his friends in turn.

  They smiled gently, as if they could all tell he was crying beneath his mirrored visor. But, in this moment at least, he didn’t feel like he had to hang his head in embarrassment. Because the presence of the grinning shrine maiden directly in front of him was the result of an indescribable success that was nearly miraculous.

  Sealed away at the southern gate of the Castle in the Unlimited Neutral Field for two years, the “shrine maiden of the sacred fire,” Ardor Maiden, was finally free. Once she moved a mere hundred meters to the south and slipped through the portal inside the triangular building—a police station in the real world—Utai would return normally to the real world, together with her avatar.

  “You did it, Haru.” It was Lime Bell—Chiyuri—who spoke, a grin spreading across her face all over again.

  “Yeah,” Haruyuki replied earnestly as he looked into her eye lenses, holding back translucent droplets. “Thanks, Chiyu. Thanks, guys.” Instantly, the strength rushed from Haru’s legs and he nearly collapsed on the spot, but he hurried to brace himself. He couldn’t relax yet. He still had one—no, two more things to do.

  First, the purification of the Armor of Catastrophe lodged inside himself. And once they succeeded at that, he wouldn’t have to worry anymore about a bounty being placed on his head by the Seven Kings. At the same time, the repeating cycle of catastrophe would finally be broken.

  And once they were done with the purification, training alongside Sky Raker’s child, Ash Roller, to learn the Incarnate System awaited him. He couldn’t imagine what kind of Incarnate Ash would materialize, but he was sure it would be a flashy technique to scare the wits—

  “H-huh?” Haruyuki realized that the skull face of the century-end rider was not currently before his eyes. Blinking back the tears blurring his vision, he turned to Fuko. “What about Ash? You guys met up with him in front of the condo in Suginami and came here together, right? Oh, no way! He didn’t get freaked out by Suzaku and make a break for it or something?”

  He added this last bit 30 percent seriously, 70 percent jokingly, but Fuko didn’t laugh. In fact, she bit her lip lightly as a hint of unease rose up in her eye lenses.

  “Well, actually, we couldn’t meet up with him.”

  “Huh? Wh-what do you mean?”

  Ash Roller was supposed to have dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field from Fuko’s car in the underground parking garage at Haruyuki’s condo building in the real world. There was basically no horizontal distance between them. It should have been a simple thing to meet up in front of the building.

  “The thing is, Haru,” Takumu explained in a subdued voice, “in front of your condo, there were just tire tracks that looked like they had been left by Ash Roller’s motorcycle. We kept waiting and waiting, but he never showed up.”

  “Tire tracks? So then, he couldn’t wait and took off for the Castle by himself…and maybe got lost on the way or something?”

  “No. That’s hard to imagine.” Fuko shook her head lightly. “He knows the route from Suginami to the Imperial Palace quite well. It’s also easy to find the way in the Demon City stage. I can’t believe he would get lost.”

  “And, Haruyuki, we chased after the tire tracks for as long as we could. They looked to continue on quite a ways due south of the condo,” Kuroyukihime said, crossing the swords of her arms in front of her chest.

  It was indeed strange. If you were going from Suginami to the Imperial Palace, even if you started out to the south, you’d have to turn to the east pretty quick.

 
Suddenly, an ominous feeling, strong enough to take his breath away, came over Haruyuki.

  Ash Roller did have his flaky side, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to blow off a promise. Especially when the person he was meeting was his master and parent, Sky Raker. Even if he had, hypothetically, seen some small Enemy that looked easy to defeat off in the distance, Haruyuki couldn’t believe he would just chase off after it on his motorcycle.

  In which case—something had happened. Most likely while he was on standby in the parking garage. An emergency so urgent he couldn’t even wait to meet up with Fuko and the others had sent Ash racing off to the south. And then, over there, something else had happened.

  Two and a half hours had already passed since Haruyuki and the others had dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field. And if Ash had dived even a single minute before seven, then he had already been in this world for over a dozen hours.

  “Uh, um, I’m going to look for him!” Seized by an indescribable unease, Haruyuki spread the metal wings on his back once more. He used his special-attack gauge, recharged during the space battle with Suzaku, and floated gently upward.

  “Haruyuki, it’s dangerous to move alone! If you’re going to search for him, we’ll all—”

  “It’s okay!” he interrupted Kuroyukihime as she tried to stop him. “If I find anything, I’ll come back and get you first! Please wait for me in front of the portal in the police station!” He hovered upward, gaining more altitude.

  “Haru, if you’re not back in an hour, we’ll pull the cable on the other side, okay?”

  “Got it! Thanks!” he shouted, grinning wryly at Chiyuri’s declaration, and shot up into the sky.

  If Ash Roller had gone south from Koenji, then that was southwest from the Castle. From a height of around fifty meters, he strained his eyes, but there were too many tall buildings in the Demon City stage, and he couldn’t see anything. Gaining even more altitude, he began to move slowly.

  Haruyuki flew in a straight line south of the Castle, first hitting Kasumigaseki and then moving into Akasaka and Aoyama. He let his eyes race intently across the landscape as he flew, but the only things moving were small- and medium-size Enemies. If he had seen a party hunting Enemies, he would have stopped to ask them if they knew anything, but perhaps because it was a weekday evening, he heard no sounds of battle.