Elements

by Reki Kawahara

  Perhaps because he was aware of this, Sulfur Pot didn’t move to change this artless charging strategy, either. He had more than enough attitude to spare, but he was very much aware that the opponent he was facing was a king. He was on guard against the possibility that if he did anything interesting or tried any small tricks, like coming down from his mount momentarily to use his own techniques, she would take advantage of the opening, and he would be instantly killed by her close-range special attacks. In other words, Sulfur’s artlessness was also a display of wisdom.

  …It’s strange, Kuroyukihime couldn’t help thinking, even as she continued the very tight battle. During her two years in seclusion, she had used a dummy avatar to watch fights and gather as much information as possible. If there had been a Burst Linker this clever, equipped with enough knowledge and actual ability to tame a Legend class, at the very least, his name would have reached her ears. What might explain this mystery was the “our” he had mentioned earlier. There existed some powerful organization behind Sulfur, and it was more than likely not a Legion of the Six Kings.

  Her mind racing along these lines, Kuroyukihime succeeded in her dozenth counterattack and landed lightly on the ground. Behind her, there was a massive collision, followed by a shaking of the ground to inform her of the rubble collapsing.

  Turning, she saw that the ruins located on the eastern edge of the small town that stretched out east-west had been destroyed. Beyond that, the reddish-brown road extended and continued toward the large hotel in the distance. With that, the buildings of the town were mostly destroyed. Which meant the battle was shifting to the next phase.

  “Crikin! Go!!” Kuroyukihime said in a low voice, and the crimson avatar, who had been loitering nearby the entire time, nodded quickly.

  “I was getting tired of waiting,” he said, and dashed off to the rear.

  Still glaring at the giant dinosaur, Kuroyukihime started a slow retreat, as if to follow after her partner.

  On the back of the dinosaur as it finished turning around, Sulfur Pot called out in his bright voice, “My, my, my. Things have been tidied up rather nicely, hmm? Nick and I both prefer an open plaza, so now we can really fight with pleasure.”

  “How lovely. But it’s also easier for me to fight now, too, you know? Nothing around to get in my way anymore, and greater freedom in dodging. I’m sick of your strategy of glancing damage.”

  “Ha-ha-ha! Glancing damage—you make it sound so awful! I mean, I hate this fussy sort of method myself. But, you see, I have my own circumstances to consider. At any rate, it really takes forever for Nick’s special-attack gauge to charge up!”

  Kuroyukihime took a sharp breath at this, unable to contain her surprise. “Special-attack…gauge?”

  “Heh-heh-heh. Well, normally you wouldn’t know, right? Tamed high-level Enemies have their own individual special-attack gauges. Unfortunately, only its master—in other words, me—can see the gauge. After smashing that many buildings, it’s finally fully charged now. So then, what happens next…I’m sure you know that much at least, Black King!!”

  Sulfur Pot ceased to speak and raised up his hands, and the silver reins they held, into the air. As he yanked them fiercely down, he shouted in the loudest voice he had used since the start of the battle, “Go, Nick!! Scorching Inferno!!”

  The enormous dinosaur opened its maw wide, probably two meters in diameter. From the black depths of its throat, Kuroyukihime saw the flickering of an orange light. At the same time, the stench of sulfur filled the area—the smell of flammable gas. Instantly, she whirled around and entered a mad dash.

  A half second later, from behind, she was assaulted by an orange glow. Followed by heat. After a slight lag, a roar. The enormous dinosaur Nidhogg was firing the so-called dragon breath.

  Black Lotus’s semitransparent, obsidian-like armor crackled, almost like the sound of an empty frying pan being heated. Actually, as a phenomenon, it was exactly the same. However much her defensive ability was increased by Overdrive Mode Green, that was limited to physical attacks and had no effect against fire damage. Flames started to lick the edges of her field of view, while her health gauge was literally burned away. From over 90 percent remaining, the gauge was cut down to 80 percent in the blink of an eye and was approaching 70. If she was swallowed up by the inferno, it would take her at once down to the danger zone.

  “Lotus! Over heeeeere!!”

  Kuroyukihime lifted her head with a gasp.

  Ahead of her, in front of the intersection where the bar was, Crikin stood, arms crossed, in an imposing stance. And then behind him, piled up in a heap, a truly jaw-dropping mountain of scrap iron. At the foot of this were Lagoon Dolphin and Curren, looking exhausted.

  At once, she forgot the tight spot she was in and silently murmured, Nice work, Ruka, Mana! Now watch. Your hard work is going to flip this battle on its head.

  Kuroyukihime mustered all her focus and increased the speed of her dash even further. The fire breath that chased after her receded again. A hundred meters until the intersection.

  Standing there, Crikin had no sooner bent his short legs than he jumped straight up into the air, to an almost impossible height.

  Once he was high enough to easily cross the mountain behind him, he spread out his arms and legs and shouted the technique name. “Metal friends, be dyed my glorious color!! Here! We! Go! Mega Machine Awakeniiiiiiiiing!”

  His small body was shrouded in a red light effect, and then the transformation began. He drew his protruding chest plate in so that it was flush with his head, and similarly tucked his arms into his body. The cylinder cross-sections of his legs rotated ninety degrees to the outside and became one with a kashhk. Finally, he turned tapered feet directly downward, and what remained was no longer a human-shaped duel avatar, but rather a single red screw.

  Most likely, this was the first time his two students had seen this technique. As the girls gaped, dumbfounded, the screw began to rotate clockwise at high speed. Once it was spinning so fast Kuroyukihime could no longer see the two eye lenses on the ridged surface of the screw, it dropped directly downward. Skreeeenk!! It plunged halfway down into the mountain of scrap metal, and sparks went flying as it continued to dive inside and disappear.

  Behind Kuroyukihime, still racing toward the foot of the mountain, Sulfur Pot’s shout rang out. “Too late for the small fry to do anything now! I’ll burn him up with you, Black King!!”

  At the same time, the intensity of the flames pursuing her increased. The massive Nidhogg was starting to advance while it spat out the flame breath. Like this, Ruka and Mana, standing stock-still in the intersection, would be swallowed up in the inferno.

  But Kuroyukihime didn’t call out to them to run away—because she believed. In the true power of the level-seven Burst Linker known as the Strongest Name, Crimson Kingbolt.

  The entire mountain of scrap metal was lit up in crimson. Almost as if that region alone had lost its gravity, countless steel bars and plates rose up into the air. They came together, joined up, and almost as if they were parts planned for this from the very start, produced an enormous object.

  First, two thick legs, followed by hips to connect them. A cylindrical stomach and a boxy chest. Long, sturdy arms connected to shoulders on the right and left. And finally, a head that closely resembled Crikin’s original head was produced, and the phenomenon was complete.

  The towering, gigantic red mech reached a height of eight meters at the top of its head. It then raised its hands farther and struck a pose with a mysterious ka-kyoon sound. The impact was powerful; it was as if the world had changed to an entirely different game.

  “I-i-ippenmahgii! [It’s huge!]”

  “So Master is an amanchu [giant]!”

  With the voices of Ruka and Mana at his back, the colossal robot flashed its eyes and jumped, making the earth shake. In midair, he passed Kuroyukihime dashing the other way and landed directly in front of Nidhogg. However, that happened to be in the middle of the
fire breath still shooting from the dinosaur’s mouth.

  The blazing torrent and the robot’s massive body collided violently, generating a pillar of flames that threatened to burn even the sky. Kuroyukihime checked that her own heat damage had stopped and, carving an arc out in the surface of the ground, made a U-turn and stopped.

  What she saw was the silhouette of the robot flickering in the center of the blaze and Nidhogg beyond that, motionless but spitting out even more flames. The dinosaur had already been continually using the breath attack for nearly thirty seconds. To last that long, its special-attack gauge must have been huge, but its teeth, also exposed to the flames for such a long time, were heated bright red, and the dinosaur itself seemed to be suffering.

  However, the knight on its back showed absolutely no intention of putting a stop to the attack. Making the reins jangle constantly, he called out, unable to hide his irritation for the first time since the start of the fight. “This papier-mâché toy! I’ll burn you until there’s nothing left! Nick, more! More firepower!”

  Having received its orders, Nidhogg opened its maw as far as it could, and an even more intense blaze jetted out. Several of its teeth shattered, seeming unable to withstand the high temperature, and the corners of its mouth were carbonized black. As proof that this was not simply the appearance of damage, the dinosaur’s health gauge decreased, albeit just barely.

  A few seconds later, Nidhogg’s seemingly infinite special-attack gauge was exhausted. When the breath weakened and stopped a moment later, the vortex of the pillar of flame melted into the atmosphere and disappeared.

  Appearing from within the blaze was a steel-framed mech crouching with its arms crossed. Although it hadn’t been burned away, its entire body was blackened, and part of it had melted and now hung down like icicles.

  “Sister, the amanchu is dead!” Mana raised a sad voice from behind her.

  “He’s fine,” Kuroyukihime said crisply. “Crikin won’t be done in by something like that.”

  And as if he had heard her, the robot’s eyes flashed yellow. The massive, charred body then began to move, creaking as it did. Crikin opened up his arms in front of his body, stretched out five fingers, and turned them straight at Nidhogg.

  From the tips of his fingers, a total of ten firing lines shot out. Shell cases were ejected one after another from his wrists, and fell to the ground. Countless sparks bounced off the area from the face to the shoulders of the giant dinosaur, and the Enemy retreated, howling as it went.

  “Wh-what?!” Sulfur Pot cried in surprise as he crouched down on the dinosaur’s back. Perhaps he was unable to control the Enemy in that position; the dinosaur only retreated gradually. In contrast, the giant robot deployed the armor from both shoulders, firing the machine guns of its fingers, and launched the three rows of missiles that appeared from within all at once. The armor on its chest then opened up to produce a large-diameter cannon, and this, too, erupted in flames with a roar.

  In the blink of an eye, Nidhogg was swallowed up in countless fireballs, and its health gauge started to visibly decrease. To be able to do this kind of damage to a heavy armor Legend-class Enemy indicated incredible attack power, but that was to be expected. Before the Red King Scarlet Rain, aka the Immobile Fortress, showed up, Crimson Kingbolt had been well known as the Burst Linker with the greatest long-distance firepower in the Accelerated World.

  Any group battle he was in inevitably ended up a matter of how big a pile of metal objects could be collected or whether the collection could be interfered with. That is, once Crikin transformed into a giant robot, the enemy was basically at checkmate; nothing else could be done.

  When he had said, “You could actually call this a good opportunity. In the sense of my particular abilities,” immediately before the battle started, he was referring to the fact that they could draw the enemy into a town where a fair amount of metal existed around them.

  The full fire of the giant robot continued for a total of fifteen seconds, halving Nidhogg’s health gauge. If the dinosaur had still been wild, Crikin could never have done such great damage to it. The beast would have moved to dodge at high speed or counterattacked; it would never have sat and simply been showered by gunfire. However, it had been tamed by the item, putting it in a state where it was unable to move without its master’s order, and thus the dinosaur was severely wounded.

  Sulfur Pot must have realized the irony of this in the middle of the barrage. As he stood up slowly on his steed’s back, there was no trace of his previous swagger. A hateful light glittered in his goggle-shaped eye lenses and he said, low, “You really, you really…I mean, hurting Nick like this…”

  True to his words, the dinosaur’s scales were scorched, broken, dripping with purple blood. If the beast were showered in the same full fire one more time, its health gauge would probably be completely cut away. That said, it would take a decent amount of time for the robot’s weapons all to recharge. To earn that time, she would have to at least create a distraction, Kuroyukihime thought, and started to advance.

  “Nick! One more time!!” Sulfur Pot shouted, and yanked on the reins. The dinosaur slowly lifted its head and opened the mouth damaged in the earlier continuous flame emission.

  He was apparently going to attack with the flame breath again, but it was a proven fact that fire attacks did not work on the giant robot. In fact, while it was enduring the flames, its guns could recharge, so the dragon breath was actually almost to the robot’s advantage. With Crikin likely thinking the same thing, the robot lowered its stance once more and took on a guard posture, arms crossed in front.

  As the dinosaur was on the verge of once again spewing its incandescent flames, Sulfur Pot thrust both hands forward and called out a different attack name. “Charcoal Smoke!!”

  From the large holes in his hands, clouds of inky black smoke shot out and immediately enveloped the giant robot. The smoke soon made its way over to Kuroyukihime as well, coloring her field of view with a gloomy haze.

  Reflexively, she moved to leap back, but her health gauge wasn’t moving a pixel, and there was no sensation or change in her armor. Which meant that this black smoke was just as the name implied, a smokescreen. In that case, she could actually use it and set up a distraction attack—

  No.

  “This odor,” Kuroyukihime said quietly, and focused on her sense of smell, which was normally not given a lot of weight in the Accelerated World. The faint scent that reached her nose, the smell of sulfur—

  “This is bad! Run, Crikin!! The smoke is—” Kuroyukihime’s cry overlapped with the second attack name Sulfur Pot called out.

  “Scorching Inferno!!”

  “—gunpowder!!”

  Flames jetted from the mouth of the dinosaur, and the instant the tip of it touched the black smoke…

  A flash of light. A roar. The world shook.

  It was as if she had been smacked by a giant. But even as she was sent flying helplessly by the impact, Kuroyukihime intently peeled her eyes open to confirm the scene. Several pillars of flame shot up along the inside of the giant robot, and immediately after that, the steel body was ripped into pieces and scattered. These were soon blanketed in crimson flames and disappeared from view. She heard Ruka and Mana screaming from somewhere.

  Having been jostled in the air to the point where she no longer knew up from down, Kuroyukihime hit the ground on her back. The initial explosion and her subsequent fall had together brought her health gauge down over 30 percent, coloring it yellow.

  The second shot of flame breath seemed to have ended in a mere one or two seconds, but that was plenty. The flames weakened, and when the gray smoke was cleared away by the wind of the stage, what appeared was a gruesome scene that could be described as nothing other than “ground zero.” The remains of the robot were scattered in the center of the charred earth, and the majority of the surrounding rubble had been blown away.

  In the nearby intersection, Lagoon Dolphin and Coral Merrow had colla
psed next to each other, while Kuroyukihime was still unable to stand because of the aftershock of the incredibly large impact.

  “Crikin.” She pushed a hoarse voice from her throat, and something fell whistling from the sky. It landed a few meters to her left and tumbled along the ground—a large screw, or rather Crikin, ejected from the center of the robot. His eyes blinked irregularly, and he didn’t look like he would be moving for the time being, either.

  The destruction was breathtaking, making even the full fire of the giant robot before seem like a child’s trick.

  Sulfur Pot’s special attack—shooting black gunpowder as smoke—and Nidhogg’s special attack—emitting flames over a wide radius—were a terrifying combo, and that combo had uprooted and flipped the battle status.

  “Heh! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!”

  At the maniacal laughter, Kuroyukihime turned her gaze upward, her avatar creaking, and saw a massive shadow approaching, black plumes of smoke still wafting upward.

  “I never thought I’d use that in a place like this. Although I don’t really like to use it, because I don’t make it out scot-free, either, you know.”

  Just as he said, the dinosaur and its knight appearing from the smoke had fresh wounds all over. Because they were in the Unlimited Neutral Field, she couldn’t see Sulfur Pot’s health gauge, but the second tier of Nidhogg’s was basically exhausted.

  “But now you understand, don’t you? That it was inevitable I was chosen as Nick’s master. That the two of us become one, the best partners, one heart, one mind.”

  “Hmph. I…wonder,” Kuroyukihime responded in a low voice, enduring pain from her entire body to get to her feet. The sensation of pain in the Unlimited Neutral Field was raised to twice that of the Normal Duel Field, but perhaps because she had been slammed with heat and impact damage at the same time, it felt like double that again. But she stood upright, managing somehow not to stagger, and turned toward Sulfur Pot. “That dinosaur seems like it has something it wants to say to you, you know. ‘If you’re going to call yourself my master…at least ride me better.’”