Flight Toward a Blue Sky

by Reki Kawahara

  The circular saw was an immensely powerful cutting weapon, but even still, it had its weak points. If it was like the ring that had nearly taken Silver Crow’s head off, there should be no teeth on the inside. And more importantly, it was slower than a bullet.

  Of course, if he hadn’t seen Jigsaw launch it, he wouldn’t have been able to get the timing right. But his eyes picked up the extremely thin line slicing through the primary colors of the night sky in the nick of time. Just as it was on the verge of hitting Blood Leopard’s right shoulder, he thrust his hand into the ring from the side as hard as he could.

  Shhnk! came the sharp metallic squeal, and sparks scattered from his fingertips. But his slim fingers were not cut off, and he yanked the ring of fifty or so centimeters in diameter and changed its trajectory so that it flipped off into the distance behind them.

  His attack sidestepped so daringly when it was so close to its mark, Rust Jigsaw took on a faintly agitated air.

  “GJ,” Blood Leopard said simply before taking off in one final bound.

  They swooped down on Rust Jigsaw from the front as he had his arms spread out, trying to place a jigsaw in the air. Blood Leopard buried her open jaws deeply in his shoulder.

  At the intense impact, Haruyuki was knocked off and fell on his backside, where he watched in amazement the battle/hunt unfolding before his eyes.

  “Guh!” Rust Jigsaw—an avatar that looked like a collection of steel frames—let out a low groan as he intently beat at the red leopard hunched over him. But the giant teeth biting deep into his right shoulder held fast like a vise.

  If Rust Jigsaw had been a close-range type, he might have been able to turn the situation around. Each time he landed a punch, Leopard’s HP bar did indeed go down, but his was disappearing at a much faster rate. A light effect generated by the damage periodically gushed from the bitten shoulder, red so that it looked almost like real blood. Jigsaw twisted and struggled, but even when he did manage to break free of the teeth, Leopard immediately leapt up to sink them right back in, clearly having no intention whatsoever of allowing him to escape.

  After one such attempt—

  “Unh…Aaah!!” Rust Jigsaw couldn’t suppress the scream that welled up from below his mask. At the same time, Haruyuki heard an unpleasant metallic snap, and Rust Jigsaw’s right arm was ripped from the socket and fell to the ground.

  And with all the damage from that loss, he blew through the rest of his HP gauge. The avatar exploded into a million pieces in that familiar, glass-shattering effect. The text YOU WIN!! flamed to life in the center of his visual field, but Haruyuki could not stand up.

  …Holy shit, she’s strong!! This was the only thought swirling in the back of his frozen brain.

  The enormous leopard, who had just slaughtered their enemy with her teeth, abruptly raised her head and looked at him with golden eyes. “GG,” she said.

  And then the acceleration ended.

  Enduring a momentary vertigo as the sensations of his body returned, Haruyuki couldn’t immediately remember what his real-world self was doing, and where.

  Thus, as he was about to open his eyes, he couldn’t even begin to guess at what the deeply elastic something was up against his face. He reflexively squeezed his eyes shut again, his body stiffening as he wondered just what it was, when his collar was yanked.

  “Get up,” a sharp voice commanded.

  His eyelids instantly flew open. He was, of course, in the recliner in the one-person booth in the dive café on the fourth floor of Quadtower. The default setting for Brain Burst was to release a full dive along with the acceleration once a duel was finished, so they had returned to the real world, instead of the bar in Akihabara BG.

  The girl in the maid’s outfit who had dived with him from the same chair was already standing and unlocking the booth door. The instant it was open, she poked her head out slightly to check in each direction.

  Wondering what she was doing as he slid out of the chair, Haruyuki felt his consciousness chill all at once at the words that followed.

  “Let’s go. We might be able to identify him still.”

  Identify. Who? No, it was obvious. Rust Jigsaw in the real. But how on earth… He shelved the question and chased after the now-familiar plait swinging against the back of the maid’s uniform.

  Briskly but cautiously, Blood Leopard headed for the elevator. She pressed the DOWN button, and they had barely even gotten in the cab before she was talking and talking at tongue-twister speeds in a low voice.

  “I did consecutive damage to the right side of Jigsaw’s neck earlier. With that kind of pain stimulation in one spot over a long period, the effect remains for a short time even once you burst out. Look for someone near the entrance looking like that spot is causing him pain.”

  “R-roger.” That was a seriously terrifying way of marking someone. But it was probably the only way to make some kind of mark on the real-world body of an enemy in the Accelerated World.

  When the elevator stopped at the first floor, Haruyuki swallowed hard as he walked through the boys and girls acting out their fights on the game machines in the real. He shot his eyes around with the bare minimum of movement, but he didn’t see anyone doing anything with their neck. They were all just staring in a trance at the flat, old-school monitors.

  Slipping through the floor, Haruyuki and Pard stepped from the building into the throng of the street. They exchanged glances and then wordlessly split up. Heading down the left side of the street, Haruyuki concentrated all his mental powers on the dozens of passersby entering his field of view.

  The girls dressed as game characters handing out holopamphlets. The three young people standing at the end of the road, engrossed in conversation. The guy walking restlessly, weighed down by multicolored paper bags—

  Haruyuki’s eyes were drawn to the back of a boy he glimpsed on the other side of this crowd. Because he could see the pale neck with no Neurolinker attached to it. With a start, he strained his eyes and saw that the boy’s raised left hand was firmly pressed to the right side of his neck.

  Is that him?! Quickening his pace, Haruyuki chased after the boy as he grew distant. Gray team jacket. Faded jeans. Leather cap on his head. Dark brown hair sticking out. Head hanging, the boy was hurrying toward the station. With his left hand still on his neck, he pushed his right hand through space, as if to shove aside the passersby.

  Wondering if he shouldn’t call Blood Leopard, Haruyuki turned around for an instant, but her maid’s outfit was lost in the crowd and he couldn’t see her. Giving up on that, he turned to face forward again—

  “I hope you’ll join us!” a cute voice chirped, and a hand was thrust in front of him, blocking his way forward. Lifting his face with a start, he was greeted by the smiling face of an older girl advertising some shop. She was probably handing out holopamphlets, but not connected to the global net, Haruyuki couldn’t see anything. He shook his head in apology and slipped by her hand. But…

  “H-huh…” He couldn’t see him. The gray-team-jacketed back had disappeared.

  Dammit! Biting his lip, he quickened his pace and scanned the area intently. But maybe the boy had turned a corner somewhere because no matter how far forward he went, Haruyuki couldn’t find him. He hurried to retrace his steps, peeking in the narrow alleys to the left and right, but the boy was indeed gone.

  “Ngh!” Out of options, he simply stood there, still biting his lip, while the people on the street pushed by looking annoyed at the obstruction. But their irritated faces didn’t register with Haruyuki, either. Only bitter regret and self-reproach filled his heart.

  You let your hard-won clue get away.

  “Pretty great just seeing his back,” Blood Leopard said when they met up again, but Haruyuki, leaning against the wall of a building, couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “I’m sorry. You worked so hard for me.” Self-hatred at his uselessness during the duel and in the chase afterward weighed heavily on his shoulders.

&n
bsp; “You worked hard, too.” He felt a hand on his unkempt hair.

  “Huh…” He raised his face unconsciously, and something remotely resembling a smile bled onto the lips of the older girl, whose face had until then been perfectly blank.

  “You fought wonderfully,” she whispered. “I’ll tell the Matchmaker what you saw of the guy from behind. If we can pick him out in the real the next time Jigsaw shows up, we might be able to learn the secret of list blocking by monitoring him after that. As soon as the logic’s clear, I’ll send you the information.”

  “O-okay.”

  So maybe, just maybe he could still cling to a thin shred of hope? He comforted himself with this thought and at last returned her smile, although his was likely full of self-pity.

  Pard shifted her hand from his head to his shoulder, and her expression returned to its normal nothing. “Jigsaw definitely won’t show up again today. And it’s getting to be time for children to be getting home.”

  Pard was at most in eleventh grade, but she compelled him to nod obediently somehow. “Okay.”

  Blood Leopard put an end to the night’s adventures in her usual clipped way. “’Kay. Let’s go.”

  They left the increasingly busy Electric Town as the clock struck eight, and, immediately returning to Kannana from Mejiro Street, Pard took him straight to Suginami.

  “Here’s fine,” Haruyuki told her right around the time the elevated Chuo Line came into sight, and got her to let him off. Returning the helmet, he once again bowed his head deeply. “Um, thank you so much. Really. Spending this much time on another Legion’s problem…”

  Here, Pard took off her own helmet and shook her head lightly. “Akihabara BG’s an important place to me, so it’s my problem, too, now. Besides—” She cut herself off and averted her eyes for a moment, a somehow bashful look coming over the face of the Burst Linker in the maid’s outfit. “I wanted to say a proper thank you to you. You protected Rain—my king—when Chrome Disaster happened. Thank you.”

  “Huh…”

  “I hope you stay friends.” And then Blood Leopard smiled her first clear smile since they’d met, before pulling her helmet back on. The motor roared as the large bike spun around in a U-turn into the opposite lane, and she raced off to the north at an incredible speed.

  He watched until her taillight got lost among the lines of vehicles, bit down hard on his lip at all the feelings belatedly welling up in him, and bowed his head deeply, even more deeply, one more time.

  Returning to his deserted home, Haruyuki dropped his bag on the floor in his room and practically threw himself down on his bed.

  Wonder how Taku’s doing. The thought was in his brain, but it was too much to move his hand to make the call. A physical and mental exhaustion exploded in him and then settled heavily on his back.

  He stayed still like that for a while, eyelids gradually growing heavier and heavier, so he shook his head hard and yanked himself up. He couldn’t go to sleep now. He needed to talk to Takumu while his memories of Akihabara were fresh, and he hadn’t even touched that day’s homework yet.

  He took off his uniform, and after using that as an excuse to have a shower, he warmed up a frozen seafood casserole in the microwave. While he waited for it to be done, he connected his Neurolinker to the global net and placed a voice call to Takumu.

  “Hey, Haru.” The voice that replied seemed to be the same as always, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  “’Sup…You okay? You remember all the stuff up until today?” Haruyuki asked nervously in neurospeak, but the air of a wry grin came through the connection.

  “Hey, hey, I wasn’t under for as long as all that. Although I did dive for a full week.”

  “A-and your Incarnate training was good…?”

  “Yeah.” A short groan of a voice. “Although the Red King’s call was that I still have a long way to go before I can use it in a real fight. But I got the trigger at least.”

  “You did? You’re such a perfectionist, though. Don’t go diving all by yourself in the Neutral Unlimited Field and spend however many years training!” Haruyuki said, breathing a second sigh of relief, and Takumu laughed again.

  “I definitely don’t have the energy left for that. Anyway, what about you? You get anything on Dusk Taker and his list-blocking secret?”

  “That turned out a whole lot different than I expected.”

  Haruyuki told him the series of incidents from the moment he left the isolation room at the cake shop, summarizing and simplifying the parts related to Blood Leopard as much as possible. Even still…

  “Hmm. So while I was all sad and alone doing my training, you were on another date with an older girl, huh?” was Takumu’s first comment.

  “I-it wasn’t like that at all!” Haruyuki hurried to protest. “A-and anyway, you were with Niko for a whole week—”

  “Sorry to say, she only instructed me at the beginning and at the end. For the rest of it, she said something about how she had come all this way, so she might as well hunt some Enemies to earn points and disappeared.”

  “Sh-she did, huh?” Before the conversation veered into even stranger directions, Haruyuki wrestled it back on topic. “Anyway, about the list-blocking mechanism. Because I flubbed up and lost sight of Rust Jigsaw’s real self, all we can do now is wait for news from the manager of Akihabara BG.”

  “The Holy Land of duels? I’ve heard the rumors. So it really does exist, huh, the underground stadium?”

  “Although the amounts you bet and the fight money aren’t really any kind of underground prices.”

  “If we weren’t dealing with all this, I’d want to go hang out there.” Takumu paused for a moment and then sent a voice that sounded consoling. “Whatever the results, I think you did great, Haru. Nice work. Let’s just hope now that the manager over there gets something on that mechanism soon.”

  “Guess so. Thanks.”

  “I brought your umbrella home, too, by the way. Okay, see you tomorrow at school.”

  The connection ended, and taking a deep breath, Haruyuki pulled the now-warmed casserole out of the microwave and ate it by himself. He then cleared the table and started in on his homework in his room, but he couldn’t concentrate right away the way he usually could.

  Today, he would crack Nomi’s list-blocking system; tomorrow he’d attack and they’d duel, and with Takumu, who would have mastered Incarnate, they would destroy him together. Somewhere in his heart, that was the way he had expected—no, assumed—that things would play out.

  Unfortunately, that was now impossible. Leaving the situation as it stood another day meant Nomi got to spend that much more time with Chiyuri. It was too much to bear when he imagined the two of them talking, even just a single conversation.

  Haruyuki shook his head several times and tried to turn his focus on nothing but the holowindow before his eyes. But even as he struggled to translate the English text, the weight pushing heavily on his heart didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  Almost as if to mock his impatience, in the evening of that day, April 17, the tag team Dusk Taker and Lime Bell made their real debut in the Accelerated World. Haruyuki heard it from Takumu’s mouth the following day.

  Instead of Suginami, the pair invaded the Shinjuku area, the western Tokyo dueling mecca. A tag team putting Lime Bell’s healing ability with Dusk Taker and his ultimate combo technique of flying and long-distance flame power was the very definition of invincible, and the team thoroughly decimated any and all comers.

  Nomi’s tactic was entirely rational: actively use Chiyuri and her inferior attack power as bait, and then slaughter the enemies coming in to cut her down with his flames. This ruthless strategy had no drawbacks for him, since he wasn’t worried about his partner occasionally getting dragged into a ranged attack, and all the Burst Linkers facing them for the first time were turned into piles of ash.

  Given that they even came up underdog-style to defeat the two top Blue Legion members who challenged them l
ast, the Accelerated World now thundered the name Dusk Taker, much more loudly than it did at the appearance of Silver Crow six months earlier.

  8

  “A-a hundred percent win rate?!”

  The next day, the eighteenth, Thursday, lunchtime.

  Haruyuki raised an astonished voice on a bench that sat upon the roof of Umesato Junior High. “That’s…not like a metaphor or something? They really haven’t lost once?”

  “Yeah.” Takumu, seated next to him, nodded, the sandwich he had bought in the cafeteria resting on his knees. “I heard it from someone I know in Shinjuku. She says she watched every duel Nomi and Chi were in right from the first one, so I guess it’s true. Once Dusk Taker’s gauge is full and he takes to the air, no matter what the duel avatar, he doesn’t let them do anything.”

  Haruyuki stared in amazement for a while at the hamburger he had just bitten into before nodding slowly. “Right, I get it. Close-range types can’t get near him in the first place, and with long-distance types, it’s a shooting match. It’d be impossible to take out Dusk Taker when he’s got a healer.”

  “Yeah. It sucks for you, Haru, but flying’s basically such a huge power that you can’t materialize it without throwing away all other potential. But by taking it, Nomi’s got the perfect match for his long-range techniques. Right now, he’s deviating in unexpected ways from the principle of ‘same level, same potential.’ On top of that, tactically, he’s got no weak points.” Peeling back the plastic wrap of the sandwich half automatically, Takumu added in a heavy voice, “Yesterday, it seemed like the high rankers at level seven or eight were watching to see how it played out, so I don’t know what’ll happen when they show up on the field. But if Nomi ends up winning against even them, the situation’s way more serious than we were picturing.”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “Haru, somewhere in our hearts, we’ve been thinking that no matter how strong Nomi is, once Master—once Black Lotus comes back…she can solve this in a single decisive stroke. But…”