Flight Toward a Blue Sky

by Reki Kawahara

  The question of why the system had to be so tightly restricted was a natural one. However, Niko, waiting for the pair before her to respond, had an intensely menacing air about her befitting a king, and Haruyuki couldn’t bring himself to ask anything else.

  “Yes, understood!” he shouted as one with Takumu, and the Red King finally nodded, as if satisfied.

  “Good. Then that’s it for the preliminaries.” She crossed her arms in front of her flat chest and cleared her throat. “You guys’re prob’ly thinking like this right now,” she commented unexpectedly. “That the Incarnate System must be incredibly powerful if using it’s so seriously restricted, and if you master it, you’ll be able to do anything. But that is a huge mistake.”

  “…Huh.” His surprise at this won out over the intimidation emanating from the Red King, and Haruyuki unthinkingly spoke. “B-but…doesn’t the Incarnate System make the impossible possible—”

  “No. Listen, Incarnate’s not a cure-all. Get that in your brain right off the bat.” After she refuted him, her tone inferno hot, Niko continued with the faintest of smiles bleeding onto her lips. “You seem unhappy, Crow. You don’t agree?”

  Swallowing hard, Haruyuki nodded hesitantly. “Y-yeah. I mean, I-I’ve experienced myself how amazing the power of the will is. Both getting hit with that power and hitting with it.”

  “Hmm, you seem pretty sure of yourself. Okay. Stand up.”

  He obeyed the flicking index finger gesturing him to his feet and pulled his body up nervously. Feeling Takumu’s eyes on him, he took a few steps forward.

  “So now show me this power of yours.”

  Haruyuki had been expecting her to say this, so the instant he stood, he had readied himself for it. Responding with a simple “Got it,” he walked over toward a large block of ice that had fallen nearby.

  I know my Incarnate attack’s definitely not going to be anything from King Niko’s point of view, but still. Although a layer under this thought there definitely existed a feeling of Okay, I’ll show you! After all, Haruyuki had pierced the nihilistic fluctuation of his formidable enemy Dusk Taker with a sword of light he had spent a week facing off with the three-hundred-meter-high precipice of old Tokyo Tower to master.

  He stopped about a meter and a half in front of a transparent blue ice block the same size as he was and dropped his hips into a ready stance. He definitely wouldn’t be able to reach across this distance with his normal succession of punches. He folded the thumb of his right hand into his palm and lined the remaining four fingers up in a row. Twisting his torso to the right, he pulled his sword-shaped hand into his side.

  My hand is a sword. A sword that moves at the speed of light to pierce anything.

  The sound of arctic wind blowing through the stage receded and disappeared. The scene around him sank into a dim gloom, and only a single point in the center of the blue ice block floated up, vivid.

  Fine vibrations passed through his body with a whine, and the white light, Niko’s Overlay, appeared at the tip of his sword hand. This finally spread out from his wrist and up to his elbow.

  “Sha!” With a brief battle cry, Haruyuki thrust his sword hand straight out, using the thrust of his rotating hips.

  Shkeeeeng! Together with the high-pitched, crisp sound, a sharp white light surged more than a meter from his extended right arm and was swallowed up by the center of the ice block.

  A heartbeat after the light disappeared, the ice creaked, and then the enormous lump split into two pieces along the vertical crack, which then fell off to the sides. At the weight of the impact, a thin layer of snow danced up in a plume.

  Haruyuki exhaled, pulled himself back up, and turned around to be greeted by two sets of applause. Takumu was intently bringing together his left hand and the Pile Driver of his right, while Niko slapped two normal hands together.

  “Wow, that’s more serious than I was expecting. Pretty decent.”

  Haruyuki started to scratch his head in a “no, it’s no big deal” kind of way at the Red King’s assessment, but her next comment stopped him short.

  “For a first step of a first step.”

  “…F-first step?”

  “Obviously! What you used just now was one of the basic Incarnate techniques, Range Extension.”

  “…B-basic?” Haruyuki repeated, stunned, and Niko gestured for him to come back. When he was sitting in his original spot again, she cleared her throat and continued.

  “Listen, we call it a fancy name, Incarnate, but in the end, it’s just one more logic executed in the Brain Burst program, okay? The main idea of it is the ‘overwrite.’ Which is basically something the diver does with image power. To put it another way, a powerful thought causes the system—the god of this world—to mistake it for fact.” She paused for breath, and then said slowly, as if to carve her own words into her two students, “But, look, to actually make something happen, you need an image so strong that it tricks you before it tricks the system. Way past the level of imagination, all the way to conviction. And to have this conviction live in your heart, you need two things: experience built up over an overwhelming amount of time and desire, sourced from a missing necessity. An image that doesn’t have both of these backing it will not become fact.”

  “…Experience and desire…,” Haruyuki murmured hoarsely, and Niko nodded slightly.

  “So here’s a little something for you,” she said as she took a few steps back and let both her arms hang down. “I’ll show you the real thing, just once, so watch closely.”

  Haruyuki and Takumu twitched and sat up straighter. To keep from missing anything, they opened their eyes so wide beneath their helmets that the orbs almost popped out.

  The small, girl-shaped avatar spun around toward the south side of the intersection. Just like before, an aura of thin red flames shot up around her left fist. “This is one of the four basic techniques: Range Expansion.”

  With no fighting yell, she shot her left arm forward so fast it was nearly smoking. The air cracked as if whipped, and a line of fire was etched in space.

  Instantly, a wall of ice some thirty meters away hissed and erupted in snow-white water vapor, which was dispersed by the wind, and they saw an enormous hole, big enough for a person to crawl through, piercing the center of the wall. The smoothed interior went from blue to black, and they couldn’t tell how deep it went.

  The two boys, eyelids peeled back in amazement, heard her pick up where she had left off. “And this is the second basic technique, Movement Expansion.”

  The flaming aura wrapped itself around her small legs this time. The avatar quickly sank down, and then she completely disappeared.

  No. Haruyuki’s eyes could just make out a hazy, blurred shadow—from behind him. He whirled around and there was Niko, hands on her hips. She had moved nearly twenty meters from her original position. When he looked more carefully, he saw a thin rut etched into the surface of the ice, melted and smoking white.

  He didn’t even have time to take a breath before Niko vanished again, leaving nothing but a soft echo behind. A circular rut enclosed Haruyuki and Takumu, and she was back in her original position.

  It was overwhelming. The range of her long-distance attack was far beyond Silver Crow’s sword of light, and the speed of her sliding dash easily put the charge of Ash Roller’s bike to shame.

  Clenching both hands tightly to control his immense surprise, Haruyuki waited for the next performance, so as not to miss a single thing.

  However…

  The bright red avatar spread her hands out lightly. “The end.”

  “B-but…” It was Takumu who spoke. “Before, you said that there were four basic techniques—”

  “There are. The third is Attack Power Expansion. And the fourth is Armor Strength Expansion. But, look…I can’t use either of them.”

  “Y-you can’t?! Basic techniques…You, a king?!” Haruyuki shouted reflexively, and Niko glared at him hard. Still, she explained without losing her cool.
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  “That’s right. Because…I personally know I’m not that strong. And that’s because of the mental scars that power this duel avatar, Scarlet Rain.”

  The cherubic mask was turned up to the snowy sky directly above. “I’m afraid of the world,” the Red King, one of the strongest people in the Accelerated World, a ruler with terrifying long-distance firepower, said as if talking to herself, in a voice that made him feel sad somehow. “Because the closer I get, the more it hurts me in every possible way. Brain Burst ate up my longing to get away from the world and made this avatar. Scarlet Rain’s long-distance flame power’s like the spines on a hedgehog. Inside all that, I’m just a weakling of a little kid with no power at all. Which is why I can’t use my will to enhance the attack or defensive power of the main body of this avatar. Understand, Crow? Pile? This right here is the absolute limit of the Incarnate System.”

  For a while, the only sound in the icy world was the reedy whisper of the cold, wintry wind.

  Haruyuki dropped his head and digested the Red King’s words in his heart. He couldn’t say he knew very much about Niko—Yuniko Kozuki—in the real world. Not knowing her real parents, she attended a full boarding elementary school that doubled as a welfare facility. That’s all she had told him. But this history was harsher than Haruyuki could even imagine, and Niko must have been hurting all this time. So much so that even disguised as an avatar in the virtual world, she could no longer believe in her own strength.

  In which case, Haruyuki thought, it’s clear, actually too clear, that my avatar reflects my longing to run away from this place. Hands to reach for something beyond reach. Wings to flee to a place where there’s no one. That’s why I could master the Incarnate Range Expansion and why I could recharge the gauge for the Gale Thruster with the Incarnate Movement Expansion. And for the same reason, I probably won’t be able to use the Armor Expansion, which would raise my defensive power.

  But even if that is how it is, I want to believe…her. Believe her telling me over and over and over again, You can change.

  “So then is this how it is?” Takumu’s quiet murmur broke the long silence. “The Incarnate abilities you can obtain are limited to those that conform with the duel avatar’s essential nature? Or to put it another way, even if you master Incarnate, you can’t do what you can’t do.”

  “Right,” Niko declared shortly, and turned her eyes on Haruyuki. “Like that Range Expansion Crow demonstrated before. To be perfectly honest, with the speed and flying ability that Silver Crow has, you don’t really need that technique. Although that was probably the optimal training for you to get how to use the Image Control circuits. And you can say the same thing about the techniques I showed you. I made a big deal of making that huge hole in the ice, but even without focusing on the image, I got this.” She patted the holster on her hip. “If I had used this, I could’ve made a bigger hole way easier. So then why do you need an Incarnate attack?”

  Haruyuki stared at Niko as she stopped talking, and cocked his head to the side. But Takumu, being Takumu, sat up very straight and answered crisply, “Because Incarnate attacks can only be defended against with Incarnate attacks, right?”

  “That’s exactly it. Because the Image Control System determines the results of offense and defense faster than commands given to the system by Movement Control. It’s like you have swords and shields and clubs, and the enemy has a laser rifle. And, Professor, you were on the receiving end of an Incarnate attack from this Dusk Taker guy, without knowing anything about anything. You totally get how absurd that sitch is.”

  “…The way it sinks into your bones. The way Dusk Taker scrapes away everything with those claws probably belongs to the Attack Power Expansion group. It felt like trying to punch a sword with my bare fists.”

  Niko hummed nasally and placed her hands sharply on her hips. “Ultimately, you’re definitely going to need to learn at least Attack or Defense if you’re going to fight Dusk Taker for real. And so we finally arrive at the big purpose of diving here.” Here, an unusual, albeit slight hesitation crept into the Red King’s tone. “Just like I said before, if the Incarnate’s at odds with the avatar’s attributes, there’s basically no chance of mastering it, no matter how hard you train. So now there’s something I really have to ask you here. Pile, is that avatar of yours close-range or long-distance?”

  “Huh?!” It was Haruyuki who cried out wildly. After looking alternately at Niko and Takumu, he produced a dumbfounded voice. “H-he’s obviously close-range…right? I mean, an avatar this vivid of a close-range blue, you almost never see them in the Shinjuku area.”

  “That’s what I thought, but if that’s the case, then that Enhanced Armament…”

  “Oh.” Haruyuki fixed his eyes once more on the enormous Pile Driver taking up Cyan Pile’s right arm, up to his elbow.

  This Enhanced Armament shot out the built-in, meter-long steel spike at a ferocious speed. So fast, in fact, that it had once ripped the arm of the metallic Silver Crow clean off in one blow.

  If it was just that, Haruyuki thought it might just barely still be a close-range weapon, but the issue was Cyan Pile’s strongest special attack, Lightning Cyan Spike. That technique transformed the spike into a beam of light before firing it. The range easily exceeded fifty meters, setting it firmly in the category of long-distance attack.

  After staring unconsciously for several seconds, Haruyuki jerked his head up and cast his eyes far away.

  Duel avatars were created with mental scars as the source. Cyan Pile’s appearance and the Enhanced Armament of his right hand were an expression of Takumu’s hopes and fears. And Haruyuki had decided in his heart that he would not do anything to pry into that.

  However…

  “It’s okay, Haru,” Takumu’s soft voice insisted.

  Haruyuki timidly raised his face. “T-Taku…”

  “Ever since you told me about the Incarnate System last night, I’ve kind of known. That to learn it, I’d have to confront my scars head-on.”

  “Th-then I’ll just drop out now.”

  “No, I want you to hear this, too. The truth is, I should’ve told you a long time ago…” Straightening his seated posture, Takumu looked directly at first Haruyuki, then Niko, and said, “I think that Cyan Pile is essentially a close-range type. So then why was it created with this long-distance-type initial equipment? That’s probably because my fear is expressed here.”

  “…Your fear?” Haruyuki asked, stunned. What on earth could Takumu—the Takumu Mayuzumi, who seemed to have looks, brains, and everything else—be afraid of?

  Takumu uttered the following words at his friend. “I was horribly bullied from third grade to fifth. I even thought about jumping from the roof of our condo once or twice.”

  “……!!” Haruyuki’s entire body froze in shock. No way, impossible, the Takumu being bullied. The thought whirled violently in his brain.

  “You couldn’t have known,” Takumu continued gently, almost as if consoling Haruyuki, when it should have been the other way around. “It didn’t happen at school or at the condo, but at the kendo school I was going to back then. I…I mean, I’m not trying to brag or anything, but I do think I had an affinity for kendo. Ever since I started learning it in the spring of third grade, it’s like I just naturally understood the techniques. My rank went up pretty quickly, and I started winning against the older kids, too. But…I guess it was around the end of the second semester. When our teacher left us alone for a while at the dojo, a bunch of older kids said, Hey, let’s practice piercing techniques.”

  “P-piercing? B-but…”

  “Of course, you’re not allowed until high school. And I said I didn’t want to. But practicing was just an excuse. They pinned me down from behind and stabbed my throat over and over and over and over again with the wooden shinai sword. I was completely terrified. I screamed from under my mask, Stop it, please. After a while, I couldn’t scream anymore…When they finally let me go, even protected by all my equip
ment, I had these insane bruises. Even now…” Cyan Pile lifted his right hand and traced it along the left side of his neck. “The scars here don’t disappear; they’re still there. The same kind of stuff happened more than a few times after that. But I didn’t quit taking lessons. It was more like I couldn’t quit. I totally couldn’t tell my parents, or you or Chi. I couldn’t say to you, I’m quitting kendo because of bullies.”

  “Taku…I didn’t…I didn’t know…” was all Haruyuki could manage to squeeze out.

  Takumu shook his head lightly, as if to say it was okay. “Naturally, I had the option of talking to my parents or the teacher. But there were no social cameras in the classroom, and it was the teacher’s policy that we take our Neurolinkers off, so I had no proof…and more than that, I think I even lost the will to fight back. Walking to the dojo, I don’t know how many times I wished I would just disappear…The bullying kept up until the ringleader started junior high and quit taking lessons. You have no idea how happy I was when he was gone.” The last bit was uttered as if it were riding on a sigh.

  Haruyuki empathized so hard it was like he was the one talking. But Takumu’s story didn’t end there. Following a muttered, “But the thing is,” there came an extra, unexpected confession.

  “Not long after I started sixth grade, I noticed I’d developed this habit. I’d be fine during practice, but when I got to a tournament, if my opponent turned his shinai toward my throat, I’d reflexively try to guard with my own shinai. It was a fatal weakness. I tried so hard to get over it, but the more I focused in a tournament, the worse it got…The terror of the vicious attack on my throat that day had seeped into my bones. Right now, the rules still don’t allow piercing techniques, so I fake my way through it, but once I get to high school, I probably won’t be able to make any kind of serious showing in tournaments. I totally can’t handle being hit with a piercing technique or using one myself.”

  He stopped there and looked at Niko, who had said nothing all this time, then at Haruyuki beside him, and finally at the Enhanced Armament of his own right arm before quietly bringing his story to an end.