Flight Toward a Blue Sky

by Reki Kawahara

They sat at the table farthest back, and once they had a piece of cake outfitted with some serious strawberry resources and the somewhat frightening name “Strawberry Labyrinth,” an iced milk, and the two coffees they had ordered before them, Niko immediately picked up her fork and used it to stab a large strawberry that was glittering and shining at the very top of the concoction. She popped it into her mouth, filling her cheek, and grinned happily.

  She stared at Haruyuki, who had gotten carried away watching her and had started to move his own mouth sympathetically. “You can’t have any!” she said, the purest of smiles on her lips.

  “Th-that’s fine.”

  “Aaw. Just kidding! Here, open up!”

  She speared another berry and thrust it out in front of Haruyuki, so he reflexively opened wide. But with a heartless “kiiiiidding,” she rotated the strawberry one hundred eighty degrees away from him and Haruyuki’s teeth came down with a klak on empty air.

  Thanks to a purposeful cough from Takumu, who was watching this play out from his side, Haruyuki returned to himself. Right, this isn’t the time for that. He drew himself up straighter. “A-anyway, Niko. What we wanted to talk to you about today…We wanted to meet in the real like this because we had a little favor to ask you.”

  “Fay-fer?” Gulp. “Ten strawberries and you got my ear.”

  “I—I don’t know how that’ll work exactly.” He glanced at Takumu, scratched his head, and got right into the meat of this audience. “Um, we want you to teach the Professor here—I mean, Takumu—about…how to use the Incarnate System.”

  Niko froze just as she was about to scarf down her sixth strawberry. Blinking her deep green eyes repeatedly, she cocked her small head to one side, only to return her fork to her plate, strawberry still stabbed on its tines, and then leaned back in her chair.

  Haruyuki could practically hear the snap of her circuits switching, i.e., the sound of Niko’s angel mode ending.

  The innocent smile, so suited to the face of a sixth-grade girl, disappeared, and her eyes narrowed sharply. “What?” she barked in a dangerous voice colored with fire.

  Sweat dripping down his forehead, Haruyuki began to explain, but she held a single finger up to silence him. Niko stood up. “Just gonna borrow the back room for a minute,” she called to the clerk behind the counter.

  The young woman in a grape-colored pinafore nodded silently, and Niko started to walk briskly, the plate of half-eaten cake in her right hand and the glass of milk in her left. Haruyuki and Takumu looked at each other and, having no choice, grabbed their coffee cups and followed her.

  A thin hallway stretched out from the back of the eat-in corner, in the middle of which was a thick door with a sign that said PRIVATE. Naturally, it appeared to be locked, but Niko raised the hand with the glass up into the air and hit a single point, after which came the sound of the lock opening.

  On the other side of the door was a chic Western-style room about nine square meters in size. The walls and the floor were covered with a blackish paneling, a large sofa set sat in the center of the room, and beyond that was visible a door to what appeared to be a bathroom.

  Niko gently placed her plate and glass on the sofa set’s coffee table, flicked a finger around on her virtual desktop to check something, and then turned toward them abruptly. “Idiots!!” she shouted. “You don’t just start running your mouth about Incarnate in public!!”

  “Ah! S—! Sorry!”

  Haruyuki and Takumu stood ramrod straight and Niko glared at them both with eyes that looked like they might shoot fire. Finally, she heaved an enormous sigh, threw her small body down onto the sofa, and crossed her legs tightly.

  “Well, I’ll let it go this time. Sit.”

  “O-okay.”

  They also placed their cups on the table and sat down on the sofa across from her. Niko grabbed another strawberry with her right hand and popped it in her mouth. “This room’s sealed, so it’s safe,” she said in a low voice. “First off, tell me where you guys even heard about the Incarnate System. I know it wasn’t your girl—Black Lotus. Because then you could just get her to teach you, and anyway, it’s too soon for that. Way too soon.”

  Before he answered that question, Haruyuki had a few of his own. What was this shop exactly? Why would a cake shop in the middle of town have an electromagnetic isolation room?

  However, the look on Niko’s face indicated she was very much not in the mood for any detours, and he was forced to shelve his own questions. Taking a deep breath, he looked right at the Red King and began to talk.

  “Umm, it’s kind of a long story, but the whole thing started when a Burst Linker started at Umesato Junior High—the school we go to—as a freshman seventh grader…”

  Working hard to summarize the key points with utmost brevity, Haruyuki continued his explanation: that although this new student Dusk Taker was connected to the in-school local net, he wasn’t registered on the Brain Burst matching list. That he had toyed with them in the real world with a variety of tricks to back them into a corner. That he had used the special attack Demonic Commandeer to take Haruyuki’s wings in the Accelerated World. That to fight back against this difficult enemy, Haruyuki had trained long hours in the Unlimited Neutral Field and studied how to use his will. That although they had been one step away from driving Dusk Taker into his own desperate corner thanks to this power, they had lost in an upset because of Lime Bell’s sudden breakaway. And then, finally, that the Black King, Black Lotus, was on a school trip and would be away until the following Saturday.

  He left out only Lime Bell’s healing abilities and Dusk Taker’s real information—i.e., the name Seiji Nomi.

  The whole thing took nearly fifteen minutes, and once Haruyuki was finished, Niko still kept her mouth mostly shut. She stuffed her cheek with the final strawberry from the cake she had eaten as she listened, taking her time with it. Finally, she hummed nasally.

  “Right, I get it. Dusk Taker…He’s a duel avatar with a plundering ability. Add in the fact that he uses the Incarnate, and he really would be too much for you two to handle as you are now.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s just as you say,” Takumu said quietly. “Even in a situation where I should have the advantage, like close combat inside a building, once he started to use the Incarnate System, I couldn’t fight back at all. I’m nothing more than baggage right now. I’m in the way. And…I hate that more than anything.”

  Niko shot a sharp look at Takumu as he pressed his clasped hands against his forehead in supplication, and then she let out a thoughtful sigh. “Which is why you came all the way to Nerima to ask me to teach the two of you—or rather, Pile—how to use the Incarnate System.”

  “That’s exactly it, Red King.” Takumu nodded deeply.

  Niko deftly twirled her fork between her fingers and pointed the handle at each of them in turn. “Well, it’s not like I don’t sympathize with the situation you guys are in. But…to be honest, this is someone else’s fight, another king’s Legion’s. And if I decided to, say, ignore this instead, Nega Nebulus’d be destroyed for me, and that’s a future pain in my ass gone. That’s the rational conclusion here, yeah?” Unable to contain himself, Haruyuki tried to butt in. But Niko still had more to say. “So let’s say I say that. And then Crow there’s gonna say something like, How can you say that when you came to us for help when your own Legion was in trouble? I think you still seriously owe us one. Or something. Right? That’s the gist of it?”

  Haruyuki had been about to say exactly that. Beaten to the punch, he simply flapped his jaw.

  Niko returned the fork to her plate, pushed the whole thing to a corner of the table, thumped her rain-boot-free feet up in the now-empty space, and clasped her hands behind her head. “Aaah, I knew something like this would happen one of these days! Lecture on the Incarnate Systeeeeem, that’s some pretty steep interest on that debt.”

  As he watched Niko sighing and shaking her head, Haruyuki leaned forward unconsciously. “What? So, so then�
�you’ll do it?”

  “Got no choice, do I? Pretty annoying to have people thinking I don’t pay back my debts, right? Honestly, if I knew this was what was up, I would’ve gotten the Royal Palace instead of the Strawberry Labyrinth,” she grumped, and Haruyuki couldn’t suppress the warmth expanding in his chest.

  He knew that people in the Accelerated World did not exist just to fight as duelers. Even if they stood against each other as enemies, there was something more important than that. There was friendship, bonds.

  Not knowing how to express the emotions overflowing inside him, Haruyuki grabbed one of the bobby-sock-clad feet that had been thrown up on the table in front of him. Instantly—

  “Eeaah!! Wh-why do you always grab my feet, you total perv!!” she shrieked in anger, and kicked with her other leg to bury that foot in Haruyuki’s cheek.

  Steam rising from her head, Instructor Niko’s first command was, “Get the plugs from under the table and connect them to your Neurolinkers.”

  They twisted their necks and groped about to find that there were in fact several XSB plugs protruding from a hub-like contraption with a winding device. At any rate, although he pulled one out at the same time as Takumu, he felt a slight resistance to directing with an unknown connection.

  “No tricks or anything in here!” Niko roared, casually inserting the plug. “This room’s isolated, so the only way to connect globally is with an actual cable, all right?”

  So he hurried to obey. The connection warning popped up in his field of vision and then disappeared.

  After running the fingers of both hands through space for a while, Niko looked at each of them in turn. “All right, it’s almost five,” she said in a more severe tone. “I have to be back at the dorm by six, so the time I can spend with you two is thirty minutes, up to five thirty, five hundred hours in the Accelerated World…about twenty days. In that time, you’ll learn an Incarnate technique you can use in an actual battle. And if you can’t do it, well, I can’t watch out for your sorry asses any longer than that.”

  “No,” Takumu replied immediately to the Red King’s cool words. “One week inside. That’s enough.”

  “Oh ho! Big talk, Professor. I’ll just see if you’re as ready as you think you are.” Grinning, Niko leaned her slim body, clad in a navy blazer and a pleated skirt, back on the sofa. “Okay, then. When I count to zero, we all dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field. Ready?”

  Haruyuki and Takumu also pressed their backs and heads into the sofa. “Yes.”

  “Here we go. Ten, nine, eight, seven…”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. A second after he heard Niko’s count reach one, he shouted the command to fly into the true Accelerated World.

  5

  The first thing he felt was a merciless cold, as if they had gone back in time three months.

  Timidly opening his eyes, a gradient from white to blue and nothing else filled his field of vision. Snow. And ice. Every geological feature was built from thick ice, which was lightly covered by pure white snow. The sky was a uniform surface of milk-colored clouds.

  “An Ice stage? Not happy about this.”

  At the sound of the voice, he looked to his right, where a girl avatar with ruby-red armor stood, long antennas swinging on her head. She was even smaller than Silver Crow. With her face mask and the round, cute lenses shining there, and her smooth body with basically no pointed edges, she looked like nothing more than a harmless mascot character. But this duel avatar was a long-distance fire demon who struck fear in the hearts of other avatars, the true form of the leader of Prominence, Scarlet Rain.

  The Red King stared up at Haruyuki. “Hey, Crow!” she said, sounding dissatisfied. “That metal armor of yours, it good against the cold, too?”

  “Y-yes, basically.” He bobbed his head.

  She had no sooner shouted, “No fair!” than she abruptly scooped up a pile of snow at her feet with both hands and rubbed it into his back.

  “Eeyaaaha!”

  “See! This body’ll just rust! See! See?!”

  “Jaaah! When I said good against the cold, I meant cold damage! The sensation of cold is still the same, you know!!”

  Bouncing around to escape the ice attack, he heard an exaggerated cough at a short distance. Turning his gaze in that direction with Niko, he saw a large avatar with dark blue armor standing there, arms crossed. Of course, it was Takumu—Cyan Pile.

  “O-oh, that’s right, right.” Scarlet Rain stepped away from Haruyuki, seemingly embarrassed, and coughed theatrically. “Anyhoooo, I’ll just say welcome to my Nerima! Although if things were different, I’d be swooping in to chase your asses out of here!” She flung her arms out with a flourish, so Haruyuki looked around once again.

  The first thing he felt was the immensity of the sky. He quickly understood the reason for this. Although the frozen intersection of roads where they were currently standing wasn’t that large, there were basically no large-terrain objects that would obstruct his field of view. He could see a lone, tall ice palace in the northwest. He overlaid a map of the real world for comparison in the back of his mind and figured it was probably the Nerima Ward office. Other than that, there was just an enormous tower, hazy as though melting into the distant eastern sky. That was probably Sunshine City in Ikebukuro in Toshima Ward, where they had fought Chrome Disaster. There were no enemies or other Burst Linkers for as far as his eyes could see.

  Haruyuki took in a chestful of the chill air. “It’s so wide open! This area’s great!”

  Instantly, a snowball howling through the air hit smack-dab in the middle of Silver Crow’s helmet. “S-so sorry there’s nothing to show you! Your little Suginami’s got nothing, either, you know!!” Niko shouted, antennas standing on end. She turned away before continuing. “Seriously! Introduction over! Lesson commencing immediately! Sit down over there, both of you!”

  Guessing that his words were somehow an anger trigger for the residents of Nerima Ward, Haruyuki met Takumu’s eyes and hurriedly took a formal kneeling position in the center of the intersection.

  Scarlet Rain’s aura abruptly changed as she drew herself up to her full height and paced briskly before them, arms crossed. The childishness that had drifted about her evaporated without a trace. The light emitted from within her lenses grew starker, and the physical stature of the avatar even seemed to grow.

  “I’ll just say this to start.” Her voice was tinged with an echo cooler and crisper than the icy wind of the stage. “Before I teach you about the Incarnate System, there’s one thing you have to swear to me.” She looked at Haruyuki, who gulped loudly, and Takumu in turn, before announcing succinctly, “You absolutely must not use an Incarnate attack unless attacked with an Incarnate attack. Swear on your pride as a Burst Linker that you will always obey this rule!”

  “Uh, um, is that because it’s cowardly?” Haruyuki asked involuntarily, and Niko refuted him immediately.

  “No. It’s because in this game, the real enemy is you yourself. Because ultimately, Incarnate exists not for defeating enemies but for confronting your own weakness. So? You swear it?”

  Pressed like this, there was no way they could say no. And they didn’t want to study the Incarnate System so that they could use it to win in duels. It was just to fight the Incarnate user Dusk Taker. Haruyuki and Takumu glanced over at each other. “Yes!” they shouted in unison.

  “Good. You break this promise, and I’ll take responsibility and show you a serious world of hurt.”

  Bobbing his head up and down at lightning speed, Haruyuki timidly asked a follow-up question. “Uh, but, I mean, an Incarnate attack, at first glance, it’s hard to tell apart from a regular special attack. I feel like you don’t know until you’re hit—”

  “Look, you’ve at least learned the first steps, haven’t you?” Niko said, slightly disgusted, and stuck out the index finger of her right hand. “Listen up. An Incarnate attack is different from a special attack in two big ways. One: When you use
it, your special-attack gauge doesn’t go down!”

  “O-oh, th-that’s true.” Haruyuki nodded, but the next question soon popped into his head. “But then what are you supposed to do in the Unlimited Neutral Field, where you can’t see your opponent’s gauge?”

  Niko threw another finger up. “Two! It glows!”

  “I-it glows?” He parroted her too-vague words back at her. Although it was true, now that she mentioned it: Haruyuki’s sword of light was indeed a white light, and Nomi’s nihilistic pulsation also emitted a purple light, but was this a systemic phenomenon shared by all Incarnate attacks?

  Niko heard the uncertainty in Haruyuki’s voice, and a faint smile spread across her lips. “This isn’t some wishy-washy thing like a battle cry or fighting spirit or whatever. Listen up. When you use an Incarnate attack, your consciousness and your duel avatar are connected through the Image Control System. When excessive imagination passes through this circuit, the irregular signals spamming the system are processed as a particulate effect with no real form—in other words, as light. Specifically, it’s…like this.”

  Niko clenched the right hand still thrust out in front of her. Suddenly, red flames rose from her fist up to her elbow. Or rather, they weren’t exactly flames, but a red light wrapped around her arm, flickering.

  “It depends on the strength of the will, but if the image’s strong enough to use in a fight, it’ll definitely glow this much at least. We just call it ‘Overlay.’ Get it? And the one and only time an avatar continuously emits light like this is when the Incarnate System has been activated. Even if a special attack does glow, it’s only for a second.”

  The flames disappeared as abruptly as they had arrived. “In other words,” Niko said, summing up, “if the enemy avatar glows with an aura like the one I had just now, and their gauge doesn’t go down, it’s an Incarnate attack. But, look…even if you do get in that kind of sitch, if you can run, run. Responding with Incarnate to Incarnate is only for those fights when there’s literally no other way. Got it?!”