If I drew my sword, there was no doubt the robot would attack. Its form was a little awkward, but it left no openings in the way it held itself. The battle aura radiating from it was definitely not something a soulless NPC or monster would be able to possess. In other words, the true form of this robot avatar was an actual human being somewhere.
In the tense atmosphere, I decided to at least try talking first. “Hey. Who are you? This is a private company’s closed net. Where are you connecting from and why?”
However, I got no reply. It seemed like it couldn’t actually hear my voice. In which case, I could use gestures—but it would be hard to get where I wanted in the current situation. If I moved my right hand even the slightest bit more than I already had, the top-heavy robot in front of me would very likely come flying at me immediately. We were both that worked up.
Well, it’s my fault for immediately grabbing for my sword. You’re just a little too belligerent, you know! I told myself. The silver robot had broken through the company’s firewall and invaded the test machine, and that was very clearly some kind of illegal hacking. But in that case, it should have been acting a little shiftier or something.
I had thought things through to this point when finally, incredibly belatedly, I noticed something in a fixed display in the upper part of my field of view.
In the center were digital numbers. Currently at 1,740 and decreasing in one-second increments. And then on either side of that, shining green bars. Lined up parallel to these were thin blue bars. Beneath the bar on the left, the text KIRITO was sharply etched. No matter how I looked at it, that was my name—the log-in ID Higa had made for me before the dive. And then beneath the bar on the right, the name SILVER CROW glittered brightly.
“Silver…Crow…,” I murmured inaudibly. There was no doubt that this was the name of the silver robot before me.
This screen composition. And this situation. My eyes flew open in surprise at the sudden revelation that came over me. This—this world was not the tranquil, harmless, and peaceful test VR space. It was a duel stage. I was diving in an old-school, one-on-one fighting game, a fighter!
Higa had mentioned the possibility of the quantum circuit the test machine was equipped with interacting with a world belonging to a different time stream. In which case, was this the world of the 1990s, when fighters were at the height of their popularity? No, no, that couldn’t be. They didn’t even have an inkling of full-dive technology at that time. So then, the future? I didn’t know how many years ahead it was, but were fighters taking center stage again in the far future?
“Hey, you…Silver Crow!” I called out, forgetting that my voice wasn’t reaching my opponent. “Is this a fighting game? What’s it call—?” As I asked, I carelessly took another step forward, my hand still on the hilt of my sword.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The silver robot-shaped avatar kicked hard off the ground with its left foot. I had no sooner noticed this than the lithe body was hurtling toward me like a bolt of lightning.
After reflexively shooting forward, a corner of Haruyuki’s mind called out, Dammit!
His opponent’s approach might not have been a gesture of attack. He hadn’t unsheathed his sword, he wasn’t in an attack posture, and his front was wide open.
But Haruyuki couldn’t cancel the attack order, output at super-high speed in his mind. His avatar charged forward and launched a preemptive midkick at the swordsman in black’s side.
Normally, Haruyuki’s duel style was far from aggressive. If it was an opponent he was fighting for the first time, his general rule was initially to watch carefully and measure attributes and technique tendencies before gradually approaching. To say nothing of the fact that before him that day was a bizarre duel avatar without a color name and his real face exposed. His only special feature was the black that covered his body. If it had been red or blue, he could have guessed he was long range or short range or whatever, but he couldn’t do anything with black. While he was facing off with this mysterious avatar, he kept thinking, I should have asked Kuroyukihime about black attributes before this! but there was no use crying over spilled milk.
The reason Haruyuki had reacted with a preemptive attack to his opponent’s slightest movement despite that opponent being a complete mystery was the incredible aura he was getting from this swordsman in black, Kirito.
With a physique on the slender side and a facial structure that could be said to be still that of a boy, although he was simply gripping the hilt of his sword and standing there facing him, Haruyuki could feel a pressure that made his throat dry. A tension almost like he was a high ranker at level seven or eight—or even higher than that, like this avatar could go one-on-one with the kings even.
If the mysterious sword user had had a little more of an opening, Haruyuki would have actually retreated and hidden himself in a narrow path of the Century End stage to take stock of the situation. But the swordsman—Kirito—had nothing that could be called an opening. If he retreated even the tiniest bit, Haruyuki was afraid that his opponent’s blade would instantly be unsheathed and try to take his head off in a single blow.
Thus, the instant Kirito stepped forward casually, Haruyuki exploded with all his stored strength.
But now I don’t have any choice anymore! He resolved himself the instant before he launched the kick.
Once Burst Linkers were facing each other, they could only fight each other single-mindedly. That’s what his master and parent Black Lotus had taught him. Hit dead-on with a right middle, get his opponent off guard, and then continue to rush him, leaving no space between them. Give his opponent no space to draw the sword on his back, and when his special-attack gauge was half-full, finish him off with a dive attack from the air!
That was the intent behind this first attack, and his leg carved out a dark silver arc plunging toward his opponent’s side.
Whk! He felt something hit lightly, and then his leg flew forward emptily, only knocking a single button off his opponent’s coat.
“Wha…?” Haruyuki groaned, falling out of his battle stance. It was impossible—at that range, with that charge, a block would have amazed him, but an evasion?!
Before his eyes, as he gaped, dumbfounded, the boy’s right arm flashed and drew a jet-black longsword, accompanied by a cold metallic noise.
What incredible speed.
After the silver avatar Silver Crow broke deep into my space with a charge, his right middle kick came sliding toward my stomach in a motion so smooth it made me wonder how many thousands of times he had practiced it.
But because it was so smooth, I was just barely able to sense the target of his first attack.
Moving Silver Crow was a real-life player. There was no doubt about that. And when a human being was controlling an avatar, the slightest bit of information bled through that you didn’t get from a monster’s motion: center-of-gravity shifts, toe direction, hip height—and the gaze.
In duels in SAO, where taking just one blow might cost you your actual life, you always needed to be one step ahead of your enemy. Thus, when you were fighting an opponent as capable as you were, if you launched a major technique from a distance, it was basically a certainty that you were not going to get a hit. So you built a structure where it wouldn’t matter if leaping attacks were blocked or evaded, and always put together the critical major attacks in a flowing series.
From that viewpoint, the speed of Silver Crow’s middle kick was worthy of admiration, but it had too little in the way of a show. I sensed the intention to shoot toward my left flank in his initial movement, and so I dashed backward with everything I had. It was actually fortunate that I had made it out with just one coat button knocked into the void.
Crow apparently hadn’t anticipated a successful dodge, and his upper body shook with the force of the empty kick. It was too appealing a moment to let pass. Despite the fact that, rationally, I figured there was no reason to fight, my right hand automatically flashed and
drew one of the beloved swords on my back—Elucidator.
“Hah!” I gave a short battle cry, feeling the familiar weight in my hand, and brought my sword straight down. Drawing out a band of pale light, the blade caught Silver Crow’s right shoulder.
“Ngah!” Letting out a thin cry, Haruyuki stared at the sharp edge of the approaching sword.
He didn’t have enough time to dodge it or block with his arms. Kirito’s movement, from unsheathing the sword to the slashing attack, was so natural that it appeared to take absolutely no effort. It was almost as if he were gently stroking the air, but the surface of Haruyuki’s avatar tingled at the enormous force hidden in that blade.
Being a metal color, Silver Crow did have resistance to slashing attacks. But he instinctively knew that he wouldn’t get away unharmed if that sword hit him. In which case, he had to at least minimize the damage.
Despite the fact that the battle had only just started, Haruyuki’s mind started to super accelerate as though this were the sink-or-swim moment. The color of his surroundings changed, and the speed of the approaching blade slackened, albeit slightly.
Haruyuki bent his knees and sank his avatar down on a trajectory that aligned with the vector of the sword attack. The black luster of the edge touched the armor of his right shoulder. Dazzling orange sparks flew up and shot off, glinting in all directions. Just as he had anticipated, the sword did not stop there. At a speed faster than Haruyuki’s descent, it ripped into his silver armor, digging in one centimeter, two. If he fell to the ground there, the sword would be brought down on him and cut right through his right arm. However…
Now!!
His HP gauge had decreased due to the shot to his shoulder, and the instant his special-attack gauge began to glimmer the faintest bit in proportion to this damage, Haruyuki converted it into momentary flight power and flickered the silver wings on his back for a fraction of a second.
With this, he managed to generate the power to move backward, although in a posture that left him nowhere to go but down onto the ground.
Silver Crow’s body slid, albeit a mere fifty centimeters. The sword pulled away from the injury on his right shoulder.
“Aaaah!!” Haruyuki roared, and kicked off the ground with all his might to leap even farther back.
What just happened?!
I held my breath as the tip of my sword bit emptily into the ground.
Elucidator’s black blade had definitely caught Silver Crow’s shoulder. It had hit the seam of his armor, just as I intended, and I was sure it would cut through in another second, but when it had ripped in a mere two centimeters, the silver robot had suddenly escaped backward with incredible force. He certainly wasn’t in a position for that kind of movement to have been possible. It was an abnormal movement, almost like he had been pulled along on a wire from behind.
I lifted my head with a gasp and stared at the avatar as if to devour it. In the blink of an eye, he had gotten more than ten meters of distance between us. Of course, there were no wires attached to any part of his body. I couldn’t see anything of a jetlike nature, either.
Wait.
The thin metal fins folded up on Crow’s back. Immediately before his back dash, it seemed like they had shaken for the merest instant. If the secret to the impossible movement was those fins, then they were not a heat-radiating device as I had assumed, but rather some kind of propulsive device. But in that case, why didn’t he use that right from the start?
Once my thoughts had gotten this far, I noticed that there was a slight change in the information displayed in my field of view.
First, Silver Crow’s green gauge to the right had decreased the tiniest bit, about 3 percent. And my gauge to the left was still full, but the slim blue gauge beneath it was shining, also by a very little.
If this field was based on an old fighting game as I thought it was, then the meaning of the two gauges was clear. The green one was the “health gauge,” which we also had in SAO. And the blue one could be nothing other than the special-attack gauge. This gauge was probably charged when you took or dealt damage. Which likely meant that the instant he was hit with my sword and his gauge started to charge, Silver Crow used that to move the fins on his back. Put another way, as long as his special-attack gauge was not charged, Crow could not use those fins in their entirety.
But in that case, what’s my special attack? I don’t have anything like that on my back.
The avatar dual sword wielder Kirito and the beloved twin blades that I was using now were my self-image—they were generated from my memory. From the fact that they were functioning in this fighting game system, the special attack should also be called up from that image. And if I was asked what my special attack would have to be, I could state it immediately: It could be nothing other than my sword skills.
I slowly drew my right leg back and readied my sword behind me to take on the stance for Sonic Leap, a basic one-handed straight sword technique. When I did, my sword whined faintly, and at the same time, the lit-up part of my special-attack gauge flashed, but the phenomenon quickly stopped. That must have meant that I didn’t have enough in my gauge to use the technique yet.
“I get it,” I murmured, and stared at my opponent before me again.
From Silver Crow’s reaction and the unfamiliar screen configuration, it seemed that if I had to say it, I was the one intruding here—no, challenging. The brutal background was also something I could accept if this was a fighting game.
Most likely, for Silver Crow, this was a game stage he played every day, and I—or rather, the quantum circuit of the fourth-generation test machine—was interacting with it. I really wanted to log out right away and give Higa a piece of my mind for creating such a ramshackle thing, but there was no log-out button anywhere in this world, and I didn’t know the command for it.
However, given that there was a timer in the middle, once the duel was over, the connection should be severed as well. Still, even if that was the case, just standing still and deliberately taking hits until my gauge disappeared wasn’t my style. And I was the challenger, at any rate. It was only polite to expend all my strength to destroy my opponent.
For the first time since I’d been thrown into this stage, my mouth turned up into a faint smile. In my head, I heard the sharp click of a switch being flipped.
The instant he sensed the unidentified Burst Linker known as Kirito smiling, Haruyuki’s virtual skin rose up into goose bumps. For a moment, even the throbbing of the wound on his right shoulder disappeared. The intense pressure blowing over to him made him unconsciously start to take a step back, and he stopped himself abruptly.
Kirito was an intruder in the Umesato local net, but the one who found his name on the matching list and requested a duel was Haruyuki. The option of picking a fight and then running away was not permitted to the members of the Legion Nega Nebulus.
This isn’t the time to freak out! If I can’t talk to him, then the only way to get info on him is to exchange direct blows—fist against sword!
At the same time as he told himself that, Haruyuki felt a fire igniting in the depths of his own stomach.
Kirito’s reaction when dodging a midkick delivered by full-speed dash was faster than any duel avatar Haru had fought before. He wanted to see that movement again. And then he wanted to surpass it. Clenching his fists tightly, Haruyuki dropped his stance, ready for a decisive charge once more.
A major attack from a long distance definitely would not hit. And in terms of reach, his opponent had the advantage with the sword. So then he had to dive in up close and personal, and break him down with small attacks.
His opponent shouldn’t be able to repeatedly swing that heavy sword. If he dodged the one blow that would likely come as a counter, he would have a chance to stick to him.
Focus. Dodge the tip of that sword like it’s a bullet. Haruyuki’s mind shifted into high gear, and his field of view narrowed to the center. His entire awareness was focused on the tip of the glit
tering black longsword.
“Go!!” Haruyuki cried, and kicked off the ground. He kept himself as low as humanly possible, and closed the ten meters between them in a flash.
Kirito’s sword, held slightly back at midlevel, began to move smoothly. From below. After the tip sent sparks flying momentarily on the surface of the ground, it bounced up to welcome Haruyuki. It leaned forward, like the lethal fang of an onyx snake.
Haruyuki opened just his left wing the tiniest bit to rotate the axis of his body ninety or so degrees and dodge the blade. Even if he didn’t have any charge in his gauge, he could still use the wings to control his form.
He howled as it was yanked upward, as the sword lightly grazed Silver Crow’s chest armor. It left nothing but a brief heat and a flash of light before the tip disappeared upward. Instantly, Haruyuki stepped in closer with his right foot and brought his torso up with the launch of a right uppercut. The fist became a bolt of silver light shooting toward the thin chest beneath that black coat.
Immediately before it hit its target, Kirito parried fiercely with his left arm. Haruyuki’s right fist flowed off to the side and stopped at merely grazing his shoulder.
However, this was all part of his plan. Now, Kirito wouldn’t be able to bring both hands down right away. Haruyuki shot out a left short hook, aiming for the wide-open body.
Wham! He felt a solid response. The body wrapped in the coat stopped.
Got him! Now I rush him!
“Aaaah!!” With a battle cry, Haruyuki launched a knee kick with his right leg. Another hit. Because he was basically glued to his opponent, it didn’t cause serious damage, but that was fine for the moment. He would freeze his opponent with repeated techniques, gauge the distance, and throw in a decisive blow.
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