Flight Toward a Blue Sky

by Reki Kawahara

  “Um.” Haruyuki glanced up at Pard and then moved his lizard mouth haltingly. “It’s not got anything to do with this place. On a local net I usually connect to, another Burst Linker with the exact same ability showed up. And I just thought maybe someone in Akihabara would know…”

  “What? At the same time, another one?! That can’t be a coincidence.” The dwarf groaned lightly before asking the obvious question. “Where’s the local net?”

  “I-I’m sorry. It’s connected with my real info, so…”

  “What? Then I’m basically the only one talking here, ain’t I?!”

  “Matchmaker,” Pard said abruptly in a quiet voice. “What’s this Rust Jigsaw’s level and type?”

  “Hmm? Level six, same as you. Color’s just like the name says: rust. So you got that in common, too, but his fighting style’s different. Guy’s hunting short-range types, leaving the mid-to long-distance ones, so you being mainly close-range, to be honest, pretty poor compatibility.”

  Pard’s a close-range type? Even though she belongs to the Red Legion, and the name “blood” seems pretty red, too?

  Blood Leopard’s next words blew this momentary question away. “’Kay. Then instead of paying you for the info, I’ll do this. Me and the kid will register as players for a tag match and restrict opponents to long-distance-type teams. If on top of that, you cancel all the remaining matches, Rust Jigsaw’ll have no one else to attack, so he should pick us as today’s prey.”

  “Wh-wh-wha—?!” Haruyuki nearly fell off his stool and hurried to grab on to the counter.

  The dwarf turned suspicious eyes on him once again. “Leopard, your name’s more than enough to be decent bait. Just who is this new kid already?”

  “Maybe more famous than me.” Pard let slip the faintest hint of a smile and whispered into the dwarf’s ear, “This kid’s the shining crow of the reformed Nega Nebulus.”

  Hyoo! The low sound was the Matchmaker half whistling from behind his beard.

  Haruyuki and Blood Leopard opened their Brain Burst option menus and registered each other as a tag team. This way, when one of them was called into a duel, they would both automatically be connected to the stage. You could check on the matching list whether or not a Burst Linker was joined up in a tag team, and a solo Linker could challenge a tag team, but the converse—a tag team taking on a solo Linker—was naturally not possible.

  When the names Blood Leopard and Silver Crow appeared as a team on the large monitor in the center of the bar, the floor erupted into commotion. Cries like “Hey! Promi’s Leopard’s fighting!” and “Why is she teaming up with NN’s crow?!” rose up all over the place, and the odds numbers immediately started to move.

  They shifted from the counter to a dim table in the corner, and Haruyuki decided to ask a few questions while they were waiting for the match to start. “Um, why a tag match? The problem Linker, Rust Jigsaw, he’s a solo act, so he’s not gonna charge in on two opponents, is he?”

  “Not necessarily.” Pard shook her head briefly, after touching the cocktail glass to her leopard mouth. “The level difference is calculated from the tag-team total, not the average, so if you challenge as a solo, you’re not out that many points if you lose, and if you win, you get a ton of them. Rust Jigsaw seems to be focused on points, so there’s a very good chance he’ll think we’re very tempting prey. My name’s fairly well known as a close-range type, and Jigsaw seems to specialize in close-range hunting, so there’s no disadvantage for him compatibility-wise. And…” Here, she flicked golden eyes toward Haruyuki and closed her mouth once, before opening it again to continue. “Pretty big rumor has it you can’t fly anymore. If Rust Jigsaw knows that, the chances he’ll attack are even better.”

  The concern Blood Leopard had shown, even if it was momentary, over the fact that he had lost his wings was hard to bear, but it also made him happy. He hurried to say something. “Right. If he kills me right away, then it’s just a regular one-on-one with you.”

  Nodding slightly, Pard brought her glass to her lips once more, and Haruyuki followed suit, gulping down his virtual cocktail. He scowled at the bizarre taste as he thought.

  Hypothetically, if this Rust Jigsaw were connected with Dusk Taker, he had no reason to be worried about Jigsaw learning anything about Silver Crow here. Dusk Taker was, after all, the very person who had taken his wings and weakened him like this.

  He checked that they still had a while before the start of the match and voiced his next question. “Also…maybe I’m getting ahead of things, but…even if Rust Jigsaw isn’t showing up on the matching list, the fact that he’s connected to this local net means that he has to be somewhere in Quadtower in the real world, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then can’t we do something to find this real self?”

  Pard shrugged her leather-clad shoulders lightly. “It’s an arcade from the ground floor to the third floor and a dive café from the fourth to the sixth. At this hour, there are hundreds of people here, very high density, so identifying him would be difficult. But…”

  “B-but?”

  “There might be a way.”

  “H-how?!”

  “I’ll explain later. More importantly…” Pard’s body next to him on the sofa moved fluidly, bringing her leopard mouth near Haruyuki’s lizard ear. So quietly, it would be impossible for any other diver to overhear, she whispered, “As long as your enemy doesn’t use it, you can’t use the Incarnate System.”

  He flinched and nodded. “R-right,” he couldn’t help but add. “That’s what the Red King said. But…but why is that? I do think it’s not fair for just one side to use that power. It’s way too strong. But if your opponent’s breaking the Brain Burst rules—”

  “No, it’s not for your opponent’s sake. It’s for yours.”

  “Huh?”

  Now that you mention it, Niko said basically the same thing, didn’t she? he thought.

  Pard brought her body even closer, and she stared into Haruyuki’s eyes from an extremely short distance. “The Incarnate is born from the hole in your heart. When you pull power from it, you also get pulled into the hole bit by bit. If you ever lose that tug-of-war, you’ll be swallowed up by the darkness at the bottom.”

  “D-darkness?”

  “The will of the first Chrome Disaster, the Incarnate running wild, was what produced the cursed Armor of Catastrophe you fought. And the kings know that, which is why they’ve been trying for years to keep the existence of the Incarnate System quiet.”

  Haruyuki stiffened once again. The Incarnate, the will was generated from hope with a missing necessity as the source—the Red King Niko had said that, too. And that you couldn’t learn Incarnate unless you faced your own mental scars.

  “But,” Haruyuki said slowly, as if talking to himself rather than Blood Leopard, “the person who first taught me about Incarnate said that what generated the will was the power of the wish. That the other side of those mental scars was hope.”

  “That’s also true, I think,” the red leopard murmured, exhaling softly. “But just like Brain Burst itself, the Incarnate System also has two sides. The other side of hope is despair. When you chase after that power, you absolutely lose something as payment. Your teacher’s probably no exception.”

  Instantly, in the back of Haruyuki’s mind, an image of Sky Raker sitting in her silver wheelchair floated up. The legs she had lost, that she would never have again. He blinked his avatar’s eyes hard before speaking, half in thought. “Even still, I want to believe. In the will…In the power of the wish. No…In Brain Burst, which saved me.”

  Blood Leopard, strangely for her, stayed silent for a long time, seemingly on the verge of saying something. Finally, she relaxed her fierce gaze and murmured in his ear, nearly kissing it. “I get it. It’s just like Rain said. You…This Accelerated World, maybe you can—”

  However, he didn’t get to hear the rest.

  Just more than a minute before the official start time not
ed on the monitor, Haruyuki’s ears were filled with the dry sound of a lightning strike. Then the text announcing the appearance of a challenger burned red to fill his field of vision.

  7

  Haruyuki, as the duel avatar Silver Crow, found himself standing on a water tank sticking out from the roof of a building. The city unfolding in all directions around him was colored with countless neon lights, similar to the scene he had witnessed before diving. Lights and lasers from the ground illuminated the clouds hanging low in the night sky, an airship with enormous glowing advertisement panels passed over his head, and commercials in a bizarre language popped up here and there in the town. But this was of course not the Akihabara of the real world. It was a 3-D file re-created from the images in the social camera net. The affiliation was “Downtown.”

  Haruyuki quickly crouched down and checked the HP gauges in the top of his field of vision. His gauge was on the left, and right below that, the gauge of Blood Leopard, his tag partner, was displayed slightly smaller. And under the gauge glittering in the top right was, as expected, the name Rust Jigsaw.

  He caught his breath under his silver mask and stared at the small light blue cursor floating in the center of his vision. The enemy should be in that direction. Luckily or maybe not, as in the Century End stage, entry into buildings was not permitted in the Downtown stage, so he had apparently gotten some distance and relocated himself.

  Okay then, first, I gotta hook up with Pard—

  As soon as he had this thought, he heard a still voice from behind and whirled around.

  “’Kay. We got a bite.” Although he heard no footfalls or even sensed her presence, the tall, lean avatar had, in the blink of an eye, popped up right behind him.

  Her overall form was very similar to the leopard-headed rider she’d used in the bar. However, rather than the leather, a dark red matte armor covered her whole body. Her mask was bullet-shaped, protruding in the front, with something like ears sticking up on the end on both sides, making her look not unlike a wild feline of some kind. The most conspicuous part of the sleek, smart silhouette was her bulging thighs.

  The very nimble-looking avatar crouched down next to him, and Blood Leopard, level-six Burst Linker, member of Prominence Legion, continued, “You and I are both close-range types; our enemy, in contrast, is a mid-to long-range. He’ll first try to split us up here with a range attack, and then come to take you out. So don’t launch any reckless counterattacks; make not getting separated from me your top priority.”

  “…R-roger.” Haruyuki nodded.

  Half a second later.

  Zzzeeee! An earsplitting vibration approached rapidly from the direction of the cursor, and Haruyuki reflexively leapt back.

  After a slight delay, the water tank he had been standing on until then split completely in two. The water gushing out spread out on the roof, and, careful not to step in it, he ran over to Leopard. She had leapt much farther than he had and had her back pressed up against the ventilation tower.

  “That just now should have been his long-distance attack Wheel Saw,” she explained, words coming almost too fast to hear, and, remembering what the Matchmaker had told them about Rust Jigsaw’s abilities, Haruyuki also responded at high speed.

  “The technique where he sends a saw blade flying, right? But it’s so dark, it’s basically impossible to see the actual blade, huh?”

  “Our only hope’s the sound. It doesn’t seem like he can shoot them off in succession, so after we dodge the next one, we go hard.”

  “’K-kay.” He didn’t have the time to nod before the whine came at them again.

  Straining his eyes—or rather his ears—at the source of the noise, Haruyuki jumped out ahead and to the right. An extremely thin ring spinning incredibly fast whirred by to his immediate left, slicing through the ventilation tower and sending it crumbling to the ground.

  Haruyuki had no time to watch it, however; he was desperately trying to keep up with Blood Leopard bounding ahead of him. The red leopard avatar was definitely more than moderately quick. She reached the edge of the building in a few steps, almost as if she were flying instead of running, and threw her body into the sky without a moment’s hesitation.

  It was nearly twenty meters to the edifice on the other side of the wide road wedged in between the lines of buildings. The leopard flew light as a cloud through the neon-colored air.

  She wants me to jump, too?!

  Don’t think, just go!

  Haruyuki pushed this transient thought into his right leg and pushed off with everything he had. The air whistled past his ears, and the roof of the building on the other side raced toward him. His feet dug into the structure a mere ten centimeters or so from the concrete edge. But he didn’t get the chance to breathe a sigh of relief. The outline of his enemy was already visible on the roof of the next building over, which was flush against the one he was standing on. The linear silhouette caught the lights of the town and glittered a rusty red.

  Rust Jigsaw! Haruyuki shouted in his mind. Are you Nomi’s—Dusk Taker’s friend?! Are you blocking the list the same way?! What the hell is your secret?!

  Almost as if laughing at Haruyuki’s frustration, Rust Jigsaw spread his hands very broadly and turned deftly aside, retreating to a building behind him with unexpected speed.

  “As if I’d let you get away!” Haruyuki cried in a low voice, and he stepped into a fierce dash. He might not have his wings, but he could still catch a long-distance type with his speed—

  “Stop.”

  If he hadn’t eased up on the gas pedal the slightest bit at her sharp call, his head would no doubt have gone flying.

  Suddenly, something hit his throat hard. Something thin and biting. Then a whining vibration assaulted him, and orange sparks scattered like blood. His HP gauge was crunched down, together with his neck armor.

  “Ngh!” Clenching his teeth, Haruyuki twisted his body as far as he could to escape whatever it was that was cutting into his neck. Pitching backward, he could definitely see something: an extremely thin line floating horizontally in the air right where Rust Jigsaw had spread out his hands a few seconds earlier.

  A jigsaw.

  He crashed to the roof on his backside and Blood Leopard grabbed his arm. She had no sooner yanked him to his feet when a round blade came flying from off in the distance to slice through the very place where he had fallen.

  After dragging Haruyuki to the shadow of a massive billboard, the leopard said, astonished, “Good thing you’re a metallic color.”

  “S-sorry, I forgot. That was his other technique?”

  “Steel Saw. Fixing a jigsaw in midair.” Her gold eyes glittered sharply beneath her pointed mask, and Leopard continued, “He keeps us at a distance with the fixed saw and attacks from far off with the round one. He really is the natural enemy of close-range types.”

  “Wh-what should we do?”

  The big cat thought for a moment. “Give me your special-attack gauge.” Without giving Haruyuki the time to react, she snapped open the mouth hidden behind her mask and bit hard into Silver Crow’s shoulder with needle-sharp teeth.

  “Eeah?!” Haruyuki shrieked and was even further astounded by what happened then. His special-attack gauge, down to 30 percent or so thanks to the earlier damage, quickly drained, while Blood Leopard’s increased at the same pace.

  Once she had stolen every pixel from his gauge, the leopard released him and shouted, “Shape Change!!”

  On both hands on the concrete surface, the avatar shone a momentary deep red before transforming from a human being on all fours to a completely quadrupedal beast. Her back was long and slender, her shoulders swelled with strength, and her rear legs were folded in a Z shape, hiding enormous power.

  “Wh-wh—”

  “Get on,” Blood Leopard said to the thrice-stunned Haruyuki, in a voice with stronger animal effects applied to it.

  Since the only thing he knew for sure was that she would bite him again if he stood there all
spaced out, Haruyuki jumped onto the back of the massive beast as if in a dream. The leopard crouched down, and, avoiding the next Wheel Saw that came flying at them from the side, she leapt off in a straight line into the night sky glittering with neon.

  “Ngh!” Haruyuki unconsciously yelped in his throat. Her dash was beyond fast. With each push of her powerful legs, they leapt a solid ten meters. Countless decorative lights melted into thin lines and flowed past on both sides of his visual field.

  Suddenly, when they had run over too many rooftops to keep track of, Rust Jigsaw’s black shadow rose up before them. He twisted around and opened both hands, a gesture he repeated over and over as he ran. The space in which he did so was likely frozen with lethal jigsaws, but moving at this speed, Haruyuki noted with apprehension that he couldn’t see them.

  Abruptly, the leopard bounded in a huge leap to the right. Landing on all fours behind a billboard illuminated by a spotlight, she then took off toward the left to kick down the neon tower there and head to the right again. They were definitely closing in on the enemy, despite the fact that he was running in a straight line, while at the same time avoiding the spaces where Jigsaw had probably placed Steel Saws with his large jumps.

  When they were only another three—no, two jumps away, Rust Jigsaw turned around and showed them something new. He drew a large circle in the air with his right hand and waved it directly at Haruyuki and Blood Leopard.

  Zzzeeee! The same vibration noise. Wheel Saw. But in the middle of a jump, there was no way Blood Leopard could avoid it—

  “Take care of it.”

  Haruyuki heard her voice from below him, and he reflexively responded, “’Kay.”