The Floating Starlight Bridge

by Reki Kawahara

  About ten minutes later:

  Fuko faced Kuroyukihime, back in her Umesato uniform now, and Haruyuki, also changed into daytime clothing, sitting together on the sofa, and silently brought her teacup to her lips.

  Chak! She returned it to the saucer and lifted her face. The same tranquil smile as always was on her face, but Haruyuki was convinced that if this had been a VR world, she would have had a little anger emoticon flashing near her forehead.

  “Well, I do understand the circumstances here. And the heavy rain last night was indeed not in the forecast? And there were malfunctions in the network in the west of the twenty-three wards? You probably would’ve encountered some difficulty in returning home, wouldn’t you?”

  “E-exactly. The rain was really quite something, Fuko. And the lightning, it was just like that time when Purple lost it…”

  Kuroyukihime acted her story out with her body and her hands, earning a bright smile from Fuko. However, that smile held an attack power on par with the special attack Ultimate Chill Kuroyuki Smile. Attribute: Terrifying wind. Right, maybe he could call this one Vacuum Smashing Raker Smile. He was so glad that Chiyu wasn’t here, too. If this smile were combined with the Superheated Chiyuri Beam, they would annihilate each other and bring down this room—no, the entire condo…

  As he escaped into his thoughts, Fuko’s next attack reached his ears.

  “Which is why I’ll be understanding of this. But if, as you say, Lotus, nothing untoward happened, then there’s no real reason for me to help you conceal the incident, is there? If Bell and Pile knew, they would certainly be moved at the closeness of their Legion Master and Silver Crow—”

  “Th-tha-that’s just—!”

  Haruyuki laid his own cry over Kuroyukihime’s stammering.

  “A-ah! M-M-Master, please, it’s just that—”

  “Well then, how about we do this?” Once again, the glittering Raker Smile. “Please invite me to a sleepover as well sometime this month. Under that condition, I would be delighted to keep this quiet.”

  “Wh—! Wh-wh-what are you talking about, Fuko?!”

  “Goodness! I did have Corvus stay at my house once, you know? Complete with dinner?”

  “Wh—! Wh-wh-wh-what is she talking about, Haruyuki?”

  “N-n-n-no, not like that, not in the real, in the Accelerated World! And I slept on the floor!”

  Whipping his head back and forth at top speed, Haruyuki thought to himself, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Sky Raker enjoying herself so much or Kuroyukihime so on the defensive. These two really are connected on some deep, spiritual level. As only honestly good friends, who shared a different history than they did with Haruyuki, could be.

  That bond was cut once by inescapable fate. And then three years later, guided by the same fate, they met again and now were completely restored. That’s what he wanted to believe. He wanted to believe it, but…

  Haruyuki had spent his time since the fall of last year staring intently at and adoring Kuroyukihime, and he knew. No matter how many walls they might try to take down, in the depths of Kuroyukihime’s eyes, there was a pain that was not completely melted away. An equal measure of self-recrimination likely lay in the shadow of Sky Raker’s smiling face as well.

  The Incarnate System required those players seeking to master it to confront their own mental scars. Because powerful imagination was only born from a powerful wish, and a wish was nothing other than the flip side of a lacking. Unless you turned toward and occasionally entered the emotional holes that made up the core of your duel avatar, holes so dark you wanted to forget they were even there, you would never be able to obtain sufficient power to produce a large overwrite.

  That’s what Sky Raker did three years earlier. She cut both legs off of her avatar to purify this lacking within herself, and then used the Incarnate System to increase the power of Boost Jump she’d been given by the original system to the point where it was Flight. If he were to seek more power than any of his basic attacks, then Haruyuki, too, would likely have to tear open the scar in his heart that he had now finally managed to start walling over and let the blood flow again. His own scar, his psychic wound, was his hatred of himself. Hatred of his ugly, fat, bad-at-talking, bad-at-sports, bad-at-school self.

  No, maybe the truth is it’s not really that. I mean, back then, I wasn’t as fat as I am now. The me back then who stood on the other side of that living room door and eavesdropped on the conversation inside. And yet…the people fighting in whispers, about me…No, that’s not it. That’s not it. It’s because I’m fat. It’s because I’m always flinching. That’s why they, I mean someone like me—

  “…yuki. Haruyuki!”

  A sudden slap on his left arm and Haruyuki lifted his face with a gasp, only to meet the suspicious eyes of Kuroyukihime. Reflexively, he dropped his head again.

  “What’s wrong? You stopped talking all of a sudden.”

  “You don’t…look so good, Corvus,” Sky Raker said, and Haruyuki hurriedly shook his head.

  “N-no, it’s nothing at all! I—I was just…thinking about the Incarnate System…”

  After his mouth had heedlessly raced this far, he realized it was not the most appropriate subject to bring up in the current situation and clamped his lips shut, but he couldn’t cancel out the words that had already been released. Kuroyukihime and Fuko both opened their eyes wide for a moment, and then after a few seconds of silence, smiles of a similar nature spread across both of their faces.

  “…I see. Was there something you wanted to ask?” Kuroyukihime brushed his hand lightly as if she had read his mind. Her fingertips, normally comfortably cool to the touch, were now the slightest bit warm, and Haruyuki exhaled shortly. The gaze Fuko had turned on him was full of a gentle light again, and at some point, words started to fall from his lips.

  “Uh, umm, well…I was just thinking. About the structure of the Incarnate System…In the end, the bigger the lack at the core of the Burst Linker, the more…I mean, the more unhappy you are in the real world, the stronger it is. Like, is it something like that—”

  “No.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  Their answers were instantaneous. They exchanged glancing looks, almost as if to determine who would speak next, and Kuroyukihime to his right turned to face him directly.

  “Those mental scars are in the end nothing more than a key deciding the attributes of the duel avatar. There are much stronger powers than that in the Accelerated World, so strong as to be unlimited. The knowledge to put together battle strategies and techniques, battle abilities cultivated through training and experience, and the bonds of friends and companions and rivals. Even in an Incarnate battle, the predominance of these powers is not in the least bit shaken. So really, it’s the exact opposite of this idea you have. Which is that those who drag their real-world unhappiness into the fight become stronger than those who simply enjoy the duel, isn’t it?”

  “Y-yeah…I guess it is.”

  “That idea is absolutely correct. Do not doubt it even a little. What we say now has that as the foundation.” When Kuroyukihime closed her mouth here, Sky Raker smoothly picked up where she had left off.

  “At the same time, there exists still another reality, Corvus.”

  “R-reality…?”

  “Yes. To other people, you may look like you are simply and earnestly enjoying the duels. But it’s very nearly impossible to be completely satisfied in the real world as long as you are a Burst Linker, even for instance, a Burst Linker like my ‘child’ Ash Roller. Because the essential requirements for the installation of Brain Burst—to have been equipped with a Neurolinker from shortly after birth and to possess a high-level aptitude for the quantum connection—are elements that run counter to real-world happiness.”

  The moment he heard this, Haruyuki gulped his breath back.

  When it came right down to it, 90 percent of the time, the reason for putting a Neurolinker on an infant was to cut down on th
e amount of work involved in child-rearing. With the Neurolinker, you could always monitor temperature, heart rate, and breathing, so you could step away from the child, and you could automatically execute a variety of educational programs instead of talking to them. And when the baby started crying in the night, you could even force it into a full dive. However, no academic or education critic could assert definitively that the baby was happy like this.

  Similarly, the requirement for a high-level aptitude for the quantum connection might seem like a superior talent that only chosen children possessed, but the truth was not so. This aptitude, or rather this affinity with the Neurolinker, was determined by how many long hours you had spent since childhood in high-density full dives; put another way, how much time you had thrown away in the real world and locked yourself up in a virtual world. Like the way Haruyuki had always escaped with single-minded focus into the virtual squash game of the Umesato local net.

  As if reading his thoughts, Kuroyukihime began to speak again quietly. “Perhaps this is an uncomfortable way of phrasing it, but…in the majority of cases, those able to meet the conditions required to become a Burst Linker are children raised without enough love from their parents. Conversely, children raised from infancy always watched over by their parents, touched by them, having conversations in their real voices, don’t need Neurolinkers or any virtual world. However, young me needed these, as did Raker.”

  Haruyuki dipped his head lifelessly and mumbled, “Of course, I needed them, too. When I was little…I was always alone in this house, even at night, and it was so scary.”

  The pale fingertips once again touched the back of Haruyuki’s hand, and she continued almost soothingly, “All of which is to say, well…nearly all Burst Linkers have a single common lack: real love between parent and child. That’s the reality Fuko mentioned earlier. And those who become Burst Linkers, when they exercise their right as a ‘parent’ to copy and install that one time, they instinctively try to select someone who bears the scent of the same scars as themselves to be their ‘child.’ As a result, we are intensely dependent on this second parent-child relationship we’ve obtained; we cling to it. To gain what we were unable to get in the real world…In other words, we cling to the Accelerated World itself. To maintain these new bonds, we try to preserve the stability and the concealed nature of the Accelerated World. Honestly. It’s quite the well-made system. You really have to hand it to the developer.”

  “Ha-ha-ha.”

  At Kuroyukihime’s chuckling, a slightly reproachful smile came across Fuko’s face.

  “Sacchi, you’re as cynical as ever, hmm? Corvus, I know I said ‘unhappy reality’ earlier, but that wasn’t to say that the thing itself is unhappy.”

  “H-huh?”

  Haruyuki fluttered his eyelids, and Sky Raker turned a gaze on him that was the very definition of the word affection.

  “What I’m trying to say is this: The Incarnate System does indeed use as its energy source those mental scars, that is to say, your trauma. Which is why in a way, it might be true that the more unhappy you are, the greater the power you can manifest. But, well…all Burst Linkers in the depths of their hearts bear the huge, enormous scar of being given a Neurolinker instead of their parents’ hand soon after they were born. It’s just not reflected in their avatar or their Incarnate because they don’t really remember it. So then it’s futile, isn’t it, to compare this with any unhappiness accumulated after this one that is so vast? Better is to compare the size of your hope. The power of the Incarnate System isn’t decided by the depth of the holes in your heart alone. It’s also determined by the height of the trees rooted and budding there.”

  Here, Fuko’s voice shook momentarily. She slowly lowered her gaze to the glass table.

  “A long time ago, I tried to force those trees to grow and ended up cutting them down at the root, so perhaps I have no right to…to speak now…” Regret and even more than that, a deep resignation colored her words.

  Kuroyukihime stretched out a hand toward the now-silent Sky Raker. “Come here, Fuko.”

  Raker stood up from the sofa opposite and detoured around the table to set herself down to the left of Haruyuki. The girls, now forcibly wedged into a two-person sofa with Haruyuki in between them, acted in a completely and utterly unexpected way.

  They stretched out their arms from both sides of him and squeezed each other tightly—and Haruyuki in the process. Naturally, all of the serious conversation they had been having up to that point flew out of his head, and, dumbfounded, he curled up into himself.

  However, for some reason, the panic that honestly should have kept up forever rapidly melted away just this one day, like ice in the sun. Instead, a warmth he couldn’t really put a name to spread out in his chest. It was something still different from the sweet, painful warmth when Kuroyukihime had held him on the bed the previous night.

  Eventually, he heard Fuko above his head. “Hee-hee-hee…We’re like a pack of kittens whose mother hasn’t come home, huddling together in the nest.”

  “It’s a happy thing to have someone to huddle together with.” Kuroyukihime’s response came swiftly. “The night ends sooner that way. And then you can tumble around and play in the sun once more.”

  “You’re right. Play in earnest, play seriously. Whatever the expectations of the developer of the BB system might be, this alone we can never forget.”

  The two of them sat there still for a while, but finally, their bodies pulled apart, neither one initiating it. Kuroyukihime placed a hand on Haruyuki’s still-dazed head.

  “First, today’s race! This is Brain Burst, after all, so there’ll no doubt be no manual or tutorial as there would be with a normal race, so it might be rough going, but we’re counting on you, Driver!”

  “R-right.” Haruyuki nodded hurriedly, and now Sky Raker was patting his back.

  “Exactly. I deeply despise things like putting up a good fight or losing by a narrow margin. And I also hate the word ambivalent. If you get ambivalent about your promise to invite me to a sleepover, I will push you off of old Tokyo Tower once again.”

  “Wh-whaaaat?! B-b-b-but th-th-th-that’s—”

  “H-h-h-he’s right, Fuko! No one’s even said anything about a promise—”

  “A-ha-ha! You’re too late. You’ve already signed the contract in your soul!”

  Listening to Sky Raker laughing delightedly, Haruyuki resolved himself anew in his heart.

  They absolutely had to win the race event that day. At the very least, they would somehow, someway reach the top. And not for the victory or the prizes. To extend a long, long vine from the past and cut the thorns of regret that held these two even then in its curse. If they climbed those four thousand kilometers to an altitude where the gravity of the surface didn’t reach, he was sure they could do it.

  And just then, the high-pitched visitor chime rang for the second time that day. When he looked at the clock, he saw that the hands had arrived at eleven before he knew it.

  “Oh! Looks like Taku and Chiyu are here.” He stood up and took a few steps before timidly offering a reminder. “Um, Master, the two of them, I mean.”

  “Don’t worry. I made a promise. I’ll keep your secret.” After Sky Raker nodded with a grin, she winked in a deeply meaningful way. “But secrets bring about new secrets, you know.”

  Aah! She’s serious.

  He tucked the thought away for the time being and raced toward the entryway before impatient Chiyuri rang the bell a second time.

  “Bow down! Give thanks!”

  Chiyuri raised up the basket in her hands as she spoke. And as usual, the starving fell prostrate with glee before the divine object—or, more accurately, the bewitching scent drifting out from it—and they ended up first taking care of the business of defeating their hunger.

  Pulled from the basket was tagliatelle with seafood tomato sauce, offering ample demonstration once again of the skill of Chiyuri’s mother. She had prepared enough for five people�
��even more than that, actually, with plenty left for Takumu and Haruyuki to have seconds. She had apparently no sooner finished making it than Chiyuri and Takumu were dashing up the two floors to the Arita residence, since hot steam was still rising up from the flat pasta when they measured it out from the deep dish. The five of them seated around the dining table scrambled to plunge their forks into their plates.

  “Mmm, what wonderful skill.”

  “This really is incredibly delicious.”

  Kuroyukihime and Fuko raised their voices in admiration at their first taste of Chiyuri’s mother’s cooking, and Chiyuri ducked her head, as if embarrassed.

  “Heh-heh-heh. My mom seemed all excited, too…this many people coming over to Haru’s place for, like, the first time ever—”

  “H-hey, Chiyu! You don’t need to make a big announcement!” Haruyuki reflexively interrupted her, but he himself knew best just how true this actually was. He also glared at a giggling Takumu before devoting himself to scarfing down pasta.

  “Now that I’m thinking about it,” Kuroyukihime said, somewhat apologetically, still smiling, “ever since the mission sometime back to subjugate the Armor, Haruyuki’s house has ended up being our sortie base for every little thing. I really should put together a proper Legion headquarters.”

  “N-no, we can use my house; it’s totally fine! I mean, my mom hardly ever comes home on the weekends anyway,” he hurried to respond before realizing that talk about parents was still a somewhat sensitive topic, and abruptly added, “Now that you mention it, what did you do during the era of the first Nega Nebulus? For a headquarters, I mean.”

  Kuroyukihime and Fuko, sitting next to each other across from Haruyuki, exchanged glances, and then nostalgic looks came over both faces. It was Fuko who replied in a gentle tone.

  “At the time, there were a great many more members than there are now, but almost none of them had a relationship that allowed meeting in the real. To be specific, it was Lotus, me, and one other. Nega Nebulus was a Legion united by strong feelings toward the aloof flower Black Lotus, rather than by relationships between its members. Longing, worship. Or feelings of protectiveness.”