Elements

by Reki Kawahara

  The drone, with an appearance like randomly connected steel pipes, set a crude tin cup down on the table and said “$×£+¥” before returning to the back. A hand reached across the table to grab the cup, and a gulping sound filled the air.

  “Come on! I’m telling you, today’s not a day for drinking! Master, we brought her, the person who’s gonna save us!” Dolphin shouted, hands on her hips.

  After a period of silence, Kuroyukihime heard a voice that was indeed deeply uninterested. “Whut? You really street duel? I tol’ you that was a waste of time!”

  At that moment, Kuroyukihime was convinced of one thing, and she stepped soundlessly into the bar. She slipped between tables that were nothing more than sheets of rusted steel and made her way toward the back.

  The girls’ master was sprawled on a couch hidden behind the table at the end of the room. Given the angle, she still couldn’t see him, nor he her.

  “Waste of time!” he shouted, as he took another swig of the virtual alcohol, seemingly unaware of Kuroyukihime’s approach. “Big ol’ waste of time, ’kaaaay! That monster’s not gonna be all ‘whatever’ just ’cos you brought one or two people to help!”

  “Hey. You there.”

  “They called me the Strongest in Tokyo. I’m level seven, and no matter how amazing I am, I can’t do nothing against that thing. To take it down, even level eight’s not enough! No way! You gotta bring me a level-nine king at least!”

  “You there. Show me your face.”

  “Nah, nah. Even with a king, it’d still be dangerous! Like maybe Vanquish, specialized in physical attacks, or like the even stronger World End.”

  “I said, ‘Hey.’”

  “The hell? You been up in it here! Lemme just tell you—unless you drag the Black King or something in here, I’m not moving…from this…” Speaking sharply and forcefully, the master abruptly sat up on the couch and got a look at Kuroyukihime with drunken eyes, causing his words to gradually slow down…until he finally fell into complete silence.

  In contrast, Kuroyukihime crossed the swords of both arms with a clang and cried, “So it’s you! This takes me back. How many years has it been, Crikin?!”

  “Huh…No way…Yikes…Hold on a…,” the Burst Linker, whose entire body was covered with a deep red armor, muttered in dumb amazement as he moved his yellow eye lenses up and down over and over. “Th-that form…those legs…and actually calling me Crikin…Y-y-y-y-you can’t be the real thing? The for-real Black King? Bla…? Lo…? Tus…?” The avatar gave voice to Kuroyukihime’s name with strange breaks, and the tin mug fell from his right hand onto the table with a sad clank.

  The master sat up properly, wedged in between Dolphin and Merrow on the left and right, and Kuroyukihime lowered herself onto the couch across from them. This was the Accelerated World, so even if you didn’t order a drink in a bar, the bartender wouldn’t get mad at you.

  “Even still, I can’t believe you moved to Okinawa.” She looked once more at Crikin’s upper body.

  He was a duel avatar with a fairly distinctive form. He had a part in the shape of a flat hexagonal pillar on his head like a hat, and the face beneath that was a perfect cylinder. His torso was basically the same width as his head, and his arms were halved cylinders. What drew the eye more than anything else were the zigzagging notches carved in detail over the surface of his armor.

  His elliptical eye lenses blinking intermittently, Crikin nodded once. “It’s been just over three years already, huh? Ahhh, my mom and dad suddenly got divorced, you know? They asked me who I wanted to go with, and I flipped a coin and picked my dad, but I never thought he’d suddenly be all ‘We’re going to Okinawa’! So I said, ‘Actually, Mom,’ but too late, y’know? So he dragged me all the way out here to Henoko, and here we are. Basically.”

  “I see. I was convinced you had been attacked in the real by a PK and lost all your points.”

  “Well, it’s about the same level of a problem, you know? And I expected it, but of course not here in Henoko, but even when I went to Naha and Nago, there’s not even the B of a Burst Linker here!” He laughed loudly, his crimson body shaking.

  Three years or more ago—back when the first Nega Nebulus had been alive and well—he had belonged to the rival Legion, Aurora Oval. He was a fairly old hand, and Kuroyukihime had been in duels and Territory battles countless times with him since she was low-level, had hunted Enemies with him over and over—a so-called comrade in arms.

  At that time three years earlier, he had already reached level seven, and when a high ranker like that suddenly disappears, the only reasons that seem plausible are a physical knock in the real world or unlimited Enemy Kill in the Accelerated World. So it was a sad memory in its way from that time, but being forced to move to Okinawa was also its own adverse situation.

  “I’m impressed you managed to stay a Burst Linker until now,” Kuroyukihime said unthinkingly.

  “Heh-heh.” Crikin twirled the hexagon on his head as if embarrassed. “Well, it was mostly just seeing how things went, though. This one”—he jerked his thumb at Lagoon Dolphin sitting to his right—“she’s my dad’s…which means she’s my distant relative. We ended up staying at her place, y’know? And I placed my bet: I’d install Brain Burst in her, and if it worked, then I’d pour basically all the burst points I had at the time into her and yank her up to level four. You can’t really hunt even lesser Enemies solo, but you’re fairly solid as a tag team, y’know.”

  “I see. So you won the bet.”

  “More than that. Her grandpa’s been teaching her karate since she was little. So she turns out to be this perfect blue-type close-range fighter. So strong, strong as hell.”

  Lagoon Dolphin—Ruka—who had until that point listened to them talk with a strange look on her face, laughed happily here for the first time. But she quickly composed herself and shook her head rapidly. “Nah, still got a lot of training to do, you know? I couldn’t even touch you, Sis.”

  “’Course not, Roo! This girl, intimidating as hell, she’s one of the Seven Kings of Pure Color—,” Crikin started to say, and Kuroyukihime smiled as she interrupted him sharply.

  “No, that’s all in the past now. I’d rather hear more about you. You succeeded in making Dolphin your child, and after raising her up to level four, the two of you spent all that time hunting Enemies?”

  “Oh. Yeah. That said, we hunted basically the lesser classes, or sometimes when the conditions were good, we’d aim for a Wild class. Slow and steady, we earned points together, and then we took the next gamble. Roo brought along Mah—they do karate together—and tried the copy/install on her. I figured we had an eighty percent chance of failing, though.”

  “Heeey! What is that supposed to mean, Master?!” Mah aka Mana aka Coral Merrow objected with a sullen look.

  Crikin laughed loudly once more to avoid answering and continued his explanation. “Anyway, miraculously, that worked, too, and we yanked Mah up to level four with the points we’d earned hunting. And then here we are now. That’s basically it.”

  “I get it. You’ve really been working hard here in Okinawa these last three years, hmm, Crikin?” Kuroyukihime said seriously.

  Crikin puffed his chest out with a proud “Well, you know!”

  “Um, Sister?” Merrow thrust her hand into the air. “There’s something I actually wanted to ask you.”

  “Hmm? What?”

  “Uh, Master often boasts that they called him the Strongest in Tokyo, but is that really true?”

  “Oh! I wanna know that, too!”

  In contrast with Dolphin leaning forward, Crikin shrank back and cried out in a high voice, “N-n-nah, I mean, that was…um…the teensiest exaggeration…or, like, maybe an arbitrary interpretation of the facts—”

  “Oh, I believe so.” Kuroyukihime nodded evenly, and all three froze in position.

  Crikin stayed frozen, but Dolphin and Merrow cried out in unison, “Whaaaaaat?!”

  Kuroyukihime affirmed his statem
ent, but she omitted the latter half of Crikin’s nickname: “the Strongest.”

  His formal avatar name was Crimson Kingbolt. Which sounded strong. At the time he appeared on the duel scene, before his form or his abilities, his name alone first raced around the Accelerated World, and the majority of the Burst Linkers who made their strongholds in the neighboring Areas began to shake at what kind of warrior would come charging in at them.

  However, this was only until they learned of his actual form. Crikin’s true nature was not “king” but “bolt”—a screw. Kuroyukihime looked it up later in a dictionary app and learned that kingbolt was a single English word referring to a particular screw used in the fields of construction and engineering.

  Once that fact became widely known, the Burst Linkers presented him with a nickname. Strongest Name—he had only told his students the first half, and who on earth could blame him for that?

  The legend was passed down even now that the reason Crikin joined the Purple Legion, Aurora Oval, was because Purple Thorn, the Purple King (also known as Empress Voltage), had jumped to the incorrect conclusion that the name Kingbolt meant a super-powerful electricity user, and she had hurried to recruit him.

  Locking away this information in her own heart, Kuroyukihime solemnly recounted to Ruka and Mana, “When the Burst Linkers of Tokyo heard the name of your master, Crimson Kingbolt, they all trembled like baby bunnies. After all, he was the Strongest.”

  “W-wow! Master, you’re not just a sakijougu [old drunk], are you?!”

  “I-I’m so surprised! I thought you were just a gachiyamah [glutton]!”

  Rather strange words to express respect for their master, but Crikin threw his head back even more fiercely and laughed hard. “Ha—ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha! That’s right, my students! Make sure you pay me the proper respect in the future and offer me up a side dish each at mealtimes! Oh, except for nabera! And I’m not too into island leeks—” He didn’t get to finish.

  An incredible earthquake suddenly shook the bar. Having thrown his chest out as far as possible, Crikin tumbled helplessly onto the floor, while Kuroyukihime, Ruka, and Mana abruptly rose up out of their seats.

  A second later, they were assaulted by the next impact. Kuroyukihime immediately switched gears and sharpened all five senses to search for the source of the earthquake. It wasn’t the field itself that was shaking. Some enormous destructive phenomenon was occurring very close by.

  “Outside!” she barked, and dashed out of the bar, onto the street out front. Carving out a deep circle in the ground with the sword tip of her left leg, she turned to the west, and it immediately leapt into view.

  Two of the large buildings that should have been towering over the end of the long and narrow shopping street had collapsed completely. However low the endurance of terrain objects of the Weathered stage, it was no small feat to destroy an entire building in this short a time. She held her breath and strained her eyes beneath mirrored goggles.

  Beyond the clouds of red dust puffing up from the ground, there was some kind of silhouette moving slowly. Big. A size that was not possible for a Burst Linker.

  “That’s…” Kuroyukihime’s voice slipped out of her.

  “Oh, that’s it, Sis,” Ruka, who had run out next to her, responded. “The magiimajimun [big monster]. That thing eats everyone.”

  “E-eats?”

  “Other Enemies. But it’s only shown up in faraway hunting grounds until now,” Mana said in a trembling voice from the other side of Ruka.

  It was no wonder she was scared. The shadow wriggling in the distance was five meters to the top of its head, and she couldn’t tell from here how long the thing was. If it was an Enemy, then it was Beast—but wait, if she got this wrong…

  “C-crap! Why’s it in town— No, this isn’t the time for that. Please, Lotus! Take Roo and Mah and escape right now through the leave point in the hotel!” Crikin shouted, the last one to race out of the bar.

  Kuroyukihime glanced at the small avatar. “Immediate escape? Is it really necessary to go that far?”

  “Yeah! If it catches us here, there’s a danger that we—or Roo and Mah, at any rate—will fall into unlimited EK!”

  “But this is a town. It can’t possibly be an Enemy’s territory! And unlimited EK’s not possible outside a territory.”

  “No, Lotus. That thing’s no ordinary Enemy.” He stopped for a moment, and then Crimson Kingbolt squeezed out in a low, hoarse voice, as though it was hard for him to admit, “That…that Legend class Enemy is tamed.”

  8

  The taming of an Enemy.

  Kuroyukihime knew there were ways to do this, but only through secondhand knowledge. There were two methods: Either the Burst Linker used their own special taming ability—although she had never once met anyone with that rare ability—or they used a special item. With the latter, although she had just once seen something along those lines appear in a treasure box in a dungeon a long, long time ago, she lost the dice roll, and it was taken by someone in her party then; she had no idea if it had been used after that.

  Her knowledge was extremely vague, but even so, there was just one thing she could say with certainty. It was impossible to tame Legend-class Enemies—because they were so absolutely powerful. They could even be said to be the rulers of the Accelerated World. They could instantly kill a midlevel duel avatar with a single blow, and with a special attack, these Enemies could easily send even a group of high-level players flying.

  Additionally, whether you used an ability or an item, you needed to first pare away the Enemy’s health gauge until it was on the verge of being completely exhausted in order to succeed in the taming. Which meant that you had to attempt to break a Legend-class opponent running wild from being on the verge of death. It was simply suicide, an act that sent chills up her spine just thinking about it.

  With these thoughts racing through her mind in the blink of an eye, Kuroyukihime turned to Crikin beside her and began automatically questioning him. “Who is it? What is the name of the person who managed this?”

  But the answer was even more surprising. “Dunno.”

  “What?! If you checked the matching list, in a second…”

  “That— No matter how many times we look at the list, there’s no name there,” Mana murmured. The slender coral avatar stood rooted to the spot, her long hair parts shaking.

  Squeezing her friend’s shoulders tightly, Ruka said quietly, “That’s why we say the one riding it is majimun [a monster]. Gunah majimun. [Small monster.]”

  At about the same time these words reached Kuroyukihime’s ears, the sound of an incredible impact roared through the stage for the third time.

  Two ruins standing in the west of the cluster had been smashed together. The distance between them and the destroyer had been already cut to a hundred meters. Should she retreat immediately like Crikin said, or should she stand her ground and carefully examine the true form of this “monster”? After a moment’s hesitation, Kuroyukihime made her decision.

  “Crikin, Ruka, Mana, and I dived after setting a disconnection timer.”

  “How long?”

  “Inside, eighty-three hours.”

  “In that case, it won’t get to them both before losing all their points. But that means, Lotus, you…you want to fight.”

  “Retreating before I’ve seen the face of my enemy doesn’t sit well with me. That said, I don’t mind if the three of you leave before me.”

  “You never change, huh, World End? Okay, then maybe I’ll join you. No matter how much of a monster it is, we got a king right here; we’ll nankurunaisa [make something happen].”

  Ruka and Mana watched over this quick exchange, hugging each other, but finally, as if overcome by emotion, they shouted, “S-so cool!”

  “Sister and Master, you’re both wonderful!”

  “Huh? Y-you think? Nah, ah, dang. But I actually prefer older ladies, so…” Crikin remarked, self-satisfied at a time like this, and Kuroyukihime jabbed him in t
he side with her right elbow.

  “Here it comes!!”

  The final building separating them from the destroyer vanished completely as if it had exploded.

  “A—a dinosaur?!” Kuroyukihime blurted as soon as she spotted what appeared through the cloud of dust.

  The tapered snout. Enormous jaw. Eyeballs shining red to either side. Thick, short legs supporting a cannonball body and a long tail. It all resembled the carnivorous beasts of antiquity she had seen in full-dive lessons in biology.

  “Its official name is Nidhogg. I just call it Nick, though.”

  Abruptly, a voice came down at her, and Kuroyukihime quickly shifted her gaze upward. She saw on the back of the enormous dinosaur a fin like the sail of a yacht. It stuck out sharply, and standing right in front of it was a small human figure—a duel avatar. This was no doubt the gunah majimun Ruka had mentioned: the Burst Linker who did not appear on the matching list.

  “You. Who are you?!”

  At Kuroyukihime’s challenge, the knight on the giant dinosaur moved his right hand lightly. The slender chain in that hand shook, glittering silver. When she looked very closely, she saw that the chain was connected to a band of leather wrapped around the dinosaur’s snout. If this was the bridle it appeared to be, then it was very likely the item that tamed the legendary Nidhogg.

  “Thou shalt not needlessly name thyself; that’s our society’s rule, but…” He cut himself off, his voice excessively bright, and after shrugging his shoulders, the knight continued. “I never dreamed I’d come across a fish as big as you way out here at the end of the world. Nick caught the scent of some huge prey, so I came to check it out just in case. Clearly, the right choice. At the very least, I must introduce myself.”

  Kuroyukihime quickly analyzed the information contained in these words.

  Of course, this was also hearsay, but tamed Enemies supposedly demonstrated various abilities for the sake of their masters. This dinosaur Nidhogg was likely equipped with a radar-type ability to search out the position of targets from a long distance. In other words, what had called the Legend-class Enemy and its knight to the little town was none other than Kuroyukihime herself.