Flight Toward a Blue Sky

by Reki Kawahara

  After waiting a full minute and more, Haruyuki whispered, “Let’s go.”

  Next to him, Takumu nodded. They stood up at the same time and jumped down onto the street. Dusk Taker jerked his head up at the sound of their feet.

  Staring over at him, Haruyuki and his friends entered the Umesato campus through the school gates and headed for the schoolyard, going around the edge of the school. The three avatars’ feet clacked against the hard tile. The light of the moon carved sharp shadows behind them.

  Rather than entering the courtyard, Chiyuri walked along the southern wall of the school and stood quietly in the shadows. Haruyuki and Takumu moved straight ahead toward the wide-open space of the center, stopping when they were about twenty meters from Dusk Taker. Haruyuki silently shot his gaze toward him.

  After a few seconds of this, Nomi uncrossed the arms folded in front of his chest and spread them lightly to the sides. “I suppose I am the one who said it was fine to postpone as many times as you wanted!” Tinged with a metallic effect, the boy’s voice echoed lightly in the pale world. “But, honestly, I didn’t expect you to drag it out like that, Arita! I’m not sure if I should call you cautious or suspicious.”

  “By now I’ve learned that with you as my opponent, I can never be too suspicious.”

  To Haruyuki’s retort, Nomi gave a short chuckle before thrusting his right hand out. Pinched between the tips of his fingers was a single card. It resembled the one the Yellow King had used before to play a video of the past, but this one was red like blood. Haruyuki had heard that the majority of special items sold in the Unlimited Neutral Field Shop were card-shaped.

  Nomi waved the card at Haruyuki and Takumu. “The name of this card is Sudden Death Duel. It’s fairly expensive, but I’ll make it my treat.” He laughed once again. “First, I’ll charge it with all the points I have. The remaining two fighter slots are set to team, so please, both of you wager your points as well. At the point when my HP gauge becomes zero, if you are both still alive, all the charged points will be evenly split between the two of you. If there’s only one of you, then he gets them all. And at the point when I defeat both of you, I get the points.”

  “In other words, if the both of us survive, there’s no need for us to fight each other, right?”

  “Precisely. Call it a little forethought on my part. The key critical factor here is…” Nomi brandished the card once more and said, “The battle won’t stop until someone dies. And the person who dies will lose Brain Burst. No holds barred, hmm? Oh, and just so you know. If you leave through a portal, it will be treated as defeat at that moment. You’ll be faced with a forced uninstall the moment you return to reality.”

  “Got it.” Nodding, Haruyuki looked at Takumu. Cyan Pile also jerked his head up and down, eyes shining fiercely beneath the slits lined up on his mask. “Okay, guess that’s fine.”

  At Haruyuki’s voice, Nomi nodded slowly and touched the card with the fingertips of his left hand. He performed several operations and the card gleamed a brief, vivid bright red. Then he tossed it at Takumu, who caught it, touching it as he did, and the card shone once again. Takumu tossed it to Haruyuki, and he pinched it in the fingers of his right hand. Taking a deep breath, he clicked with his left and touched the CHARGE button in the center of the holowindow that popped up.

  After an explanation of the sudden-death rules scrolled past in a blunt font, a YES/NO confirmation dialog popped up. YES.

  When the normally extremely curt Brain Burst system asked, ARE YOU SURE?, Haruyuki truly understood the fact that he was on the brink of death. Despite the fact that he was technically cut off from his real flesh-and-blood body, a chill ran up his spine. At the same time as his limbs went numb, a virtual adrenaline pumped into his veins.

  However, of course: YES.

  The card flashed a remarkably dazzling red, pulled away from Haruyuki’s hand, and rose up slightly in the sky. Around it, the digital numbers of a countdown slowly rolled down.

  If news of this final battle had made it into the Accelerated World, they would’ve no doubt been instantly surrounded by the largest Gallery ever assembled. Although it had been six months since Haruyuki became a Burst Linker, before now, he had never even heard of a sudden-death battle with all your points on the line.

  No. That wasn’t right. He had heard of something like it.

  Black Lotus, the Black King and a master of the sword, who Haruyuki loved and respected more than anyone. Because of a special rule that applied only to level-nine Burst Linkers, she carried the risk of sudden death with her into every fight. For instance, in the Territories every weekend: If another king were to show up, meticulously prepared, in the worst case she would lose that duel, and she would immediately lose Brain Burst forever.

  Kuroyukihime. You’ve been living all this time under this heavy cloud, he murmured in his heart, and a second later, the countdown reached zero.

  Flaming letters announced the start of the duel.

  Dusk Taker threw out the talons of both hands.

  Haruyuki crouched and readied his sword hands around him.

  But Nomi’s wings stayed folded up, and he didn’t seem to be generating the purple pulsation. Maybe he wanted a ground fight with no Incarnate first?

  Bring it! Haruyuki cried in his head and kicked off the ground. A fierce dash would cover the twenty meters between them at once. The figure of his enemy rapidly grew larger before his eyes. He cut across the shadows of the poles stretching out over the white schoolyard. One, two—

  It happened when he stepped on the third pole.

  Something sprang up, spurting forth from the slim shadow not more than ten centimeters wide: A darkness that shouldn’t have been able to hide anything closed in on Haruyuki from both sides. Squares, sides about a meter long: Two matte jet-black panels shot up as if on a spring mechanism the instant Haruyuki stepped on the pole’s shadow and boxed him in with terrifying force. Even with Silver Crow’s speed, he couldn’t avoid them. It was all he could do to stick out his hands and try to stop their advance.

  Clang! The metallic impact echoed in the night, and sparks flew from the joints of his arms. A slice was taken from his HP gauge, the only one he could see.

  “Ngh!” he involuntarily cried out at the sharp pain. Although the panels were extremely thin, no more than a few millimeters thick, they exerted an incredible pressure, like he was being clamped by an enormous vise. Very much unable to spread his arms out, he changed the orientation of his hands and intently fought back with his elbows and the backs of his hands. But the panels instantly imprisoned Haruyuki in a gap of about fifty centimeters before finally stopping.

  Listening to the creaking of his own avatar, Haruyuki forced himself to shake off his astonishment and think. There are no traps in a Moonlight stage. So does that mean Dusk Taker has some special attack I didn’t know about?! No, if that were it, there would definitely have been some kind of motion or shout when he activated it. And if he had this kind of powerful attack, he would’ve used it the last time we fought. In which case—

  The jet-black panels were not Nomi’s. And, of course, they weren’t Lime Bell’s. Which meant there was someone else on this battlefield.

  No, impossible. There was no way anyone could ambush this fight after they had postponed it so close to the start so many times. His racing brain had reached this conclusion when he sensed a ghostly presence and his conclusion was immediately overturned.

  The northern edge of the white schoolyard was sunken into the black shadow created by the four-story school building. He could see the tiny figure of Lime Bell still crouched against the wall there. Wordlessly, Haruyuki and Takumu behind him stared at the silent appearance of the fifth avatar far ahead of her, from the very front edge of the school’s shadow.

  Bizarre.

  That was the only word to describe it. Haruyuki had never before seen a more bizarre-looking duel avatar in the Accelerated World.

  The entire body was made of thin panels
lined up perpendicularly, almost as if someone had built up layer upon layer of square sheets of paper to form the shapes of body parts. There was a gap of about a centimeter between each panel, so that although a clear silhouette was obvious from the side, from the front, the avatar looked like nothing more than an arrangement of thin vertical lines. The dozens of panels were a lusterless black, as though they had all been painted with ink.

  But more than the avatar’s shape, the color had the larger impact on Haruyuki. The layered avatar was clearly and obviously a perfect black. It had none of the hints of silver, like Chrome Disaster, or purple, like Dusk Taker, or the other blackish avatars he had seen. This black was complete, absorbing all wavelengths of light, rejecting all color.

  “…Who are you…?” Haruyuki murmured hoarsely.

  However, the avatar said nothing in reply, instead tilting its square head and returning Haruyuki’s stare from behind several openings. Instantly, the pressure from the panels pinching his body increased. Silver Crow’s armor squealed in a deeply unpleasant way.

  Here, Haruyuki finally noticed that the layered avatar had no right arm. In its place, a hazy gray light shimmered around the shoulder. He didn’t understand the logic behind it, but it was clear from the color and shape that that right arm was made up of the two panels currently confining him.

  One other thing was also clear.

  This black avatar was the ambush Nomi had prepared. The ambush Haruyuki and Takumu had examined and carefully eliminated every single possibility of.

  “…Why…? How…? There should have been no way to know the time…” The groan from behind was Takumu, stunned.

  Even at this, the layered avatar maintained its silence.

  It was Dusk Taker, a few meters in front of Haruyuki, who began chuckling instead.

  Dropping from his fighting stance, the dusk-colored avatar sneered once more. “Heh-heh! Honestly. You all do let me have so much fun with you. I like it, this shocked look of yours. This is a show I’d even pay to see. Which reminds me, didn’t you say something earlier? That you’d learned you could never be too suspicious? Unfortunately, you don’t appear to have studied hard enough, hmm? Hah-hah, ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

  Laughter barking loudly, he threw both hands out. “And you’re both about to lose all of your points, so there’s no real point in doing anything for you now. Although, as a farewell gift, I suppose I could clear a few things up for you. I obviously couldn’t predict the time you would pick, and this one over there wouldn’t exactly wait months on this side for us to show up. Of course.”

  He moved the talons of his right hand farther and tapped the lens-shaped visor of his own head. “You already know that we have brain implant chips. The BIC connects growth terminals to the sensory area of the brain for a bioelectronic interface. Depending on the programming, it’s possible to reach the deepest parts of the brain.”

  “D-deepest parts?” Haruyuki murmured, and Nomi nodded exaggeratedly.

  “Yes. Naturally, it’s very dangerous. I myself haven’t gone that far. But this person here, despite appearances, is relatively daring. The terminals stretch all the way to his brain’s mental clock control area.”

  Mental clock.

  These words were the supertechnological foundation used to realize the acceleration of Haruyuki and the other Burst Linkers. The Brain Burst program accelerated thought by increasing the user’s base clock, which was based on a standard of the user’s heart rate, a thousand times within the brain. As long as you were diving in the Normal Duel Field or in the Unlimited Neutral Field, the amplification was fixed and could not be manipulated in any way.

  In other words, with Haruyuki’s and Takumu’s postponement of the time of the final battle by more than an hour, nearly two months of subjective time had passed in this world. Nomi didn’t have any friends who would patiently wait all that time to help him with an ambush. Or he shouldn’t have. And yet.

  “I’ll say it again. He has been on a dive in this Unlimited Neutral Field since eight o’clock in the real world. However, he definitely hasn’t been sitting around waiting inside for a few months. Do you understand? By inactivating the mental clock control area of his brain with the BIC, he can stop the acceleration of his thoughts at will. He is, you see, the sole deceleration user in the Accelerated World!”

  “…De…celeration…”

  Haruyuki couldn’t tell if the voice came from his own throat or if it was Takumu’s. He was speechless.

  “…Really now.” A new voice at last reached his ears, the gentle voice of an older boy, somehow seeming warm even through the electronic effect peculiar to the duel avatar. It sounded a lot like that of the young, bespectacled man who had been the only teacher in Haruyuki’s elementary school days who he had ever liked.

  With Haruyuki restrained by the terrible pressure, the layered avatar spoke in a soft voice, without a hint of tension. “Look, Taker. I can’t help but think that all this chatting and running about is what got you into a sudden-death situation in the first place.”

  “Ha-ha! I guess we differ in opinion there. It’s simply that you think silence is a weapon, and I think eloquence is. Say, what do you think? Their stunned faces? Don’t they look like our technological strength has already robbed them of the will to fight?”

  “I don’t know about that. The little one there is really trying for some reason. He’s hard, and I can’t crush him any further.”

  “Oooh, that’s a metal color for you. Even a weak one.”

  “Which is to say…” The layered avatar signaled the chuckling Nomi with a finger on his left hand. “I’ve got my hands full holding him. It’d be a big help if you’d hurry up and take care of the big kid behind him.”

  “Understood, understood. I don’t intend to have you work for any more than the remuneration I’ve already provided. Avatar like that, I’ll be done in three minutes—no, thirty seconds.”

  Nomi’s contemptuous words finally reignited the fire in Haruyuki’s heart.

  Avatar like that? You, who’s never won an honest fight against Taku! You’re calling him an “avatar like that”?! Gritting his teeth, Haruyuki let his eyes race momentarily over the panels at his sides. This is no time to let these flimsy plates hold me forever. There’re two enemies and there’re two of us. I’ll leave Nomi to Taku, and I’ll…take down this guy!

  Haruyuki focused all his awareness, including these thoughts, in one spot between his eyebrows. A metallic high frequency came out of nowhere, and Silver Crow’s body began to shake. He felt his consciousness connecting with the imagination circuits hidden within the Brain Burst program.

  For this entire time, that gray aura had been coiled about the right shoulder of the layered avatar restraining Haruyuki. Niko had said that a continuous light-emitting phenomenon, i.e., Overlay, was proof that the Incarnate System was being used. In other words, these panels were the avatar’s Incarnate attack. In which case, he would also fight, digging up every bit of strength he had.

  Silver Crow’s sharp fingertips began to glow with a white light. This soon moved up from his wrist to cover his arm to the elbow in a thin layer of light. Haruyuki took a deep breath and shouted the Incarnate attack name he had so recently come up with.

  “Laser…Sword!!”

  And then he crossed both arms and plunged the tip of his right hand into the left panel and the tip of his left hand into the right. With a high-pitched screech, the lengthening light swords crashed into the jet-black panels, sending dazzling sparks flying. The places where his swords had bitten in turned red hot immediately, as if bathed in the fire of a plasma arc. This glow spread out over the surface of the thin panel in the blink of an eye and shook them violently.

  I’ll rip them apart!! he cried in his heart, and focused in on that image. At that moment.

  “Whoops. Now, this, this is an issue.” He heard the gentle voice. Followed by, “Static Pressure.”

  An attack name call.

  Abruptly, the two panels
rumbled.

  Previously mere millimeters thick, the panels grew wider before his eyes. Five centimeters, then ten centimeters, until at some point, they were more appropriately referred to as lumps rather than panels. The two massive rectangular solids, black as if they had been cut out of the night itself, engulfed Haruyuki in a pressure far greater than what it had been.

  “Hngh!” Groaning, he pushed his own will to the limits and fought back with his light swords. But although he had been on the verge of melting the squares, the instant they turned from panels to lumps, the red-hot areas were halved.

  The gray aura wafting around the shoulder of the layered avatar grew denser. Haruyuki was more than sure now that this attack wasn’t a system-regulated special attack but rather an Incarnate attack brought about by the enemy avatar’s image.

  Through the conflict of their imagination output, Haruyuki felt like he could touch what was unfolding within the layered avatar.

  Darkness.

  Not the starving emptiness that threatened to devour everything like Nomi’s Incarnate. What existed inside him rejected all interference and had no energy; thus, it gave none and it took none. No, it wasn’t even an active refusal. It was isolation. It was an absolute alienation, a state that seemed impossible for a human heart.

  The instant he felt this, Haruyuki reflexively feared their two wills touching. The light swords of his hands weakened momentarily and flickered. That was enough. The two impossibly heavy and hard objects ate in at his shoulders, rendering him completely immobile.

  “Hey, you.” Once again, he heard the voice of the layered avatar. “As a favor, maybe you could stay quiet like that. I was only hired to keep you from moving temporarily. I’m not interested in fighting you.”

  What…So it’s all about you?! he shouted back sharply in his heart, and his light swords surged back to life. But it took everything he had just to marginally ease the intense pressure of the black lumps; he didn’t get anywhere close to pushing them away.