Elements

by Reki Kawahara

The sword slid out of his hand and grew distant, leaving a thin trail of sparks. With no wings, the twin-blade swordsman ascended endlessly in the night sky with ferocious force he could do nothing about.

  Even in this situation, surprisingly, the swordsman didn’t seem the least bit shaken. He wasn’t flailing his arms and legs, but instead spread them out, trying to control his posture.

  But now that it had come to this, there was nothing left he could do.

  The majority of Burst Linkers likely didn’t have a clear understanding of the fact, but physical attacks were generally a reaction against an action. Whether it was a punch or a kick, a sword or a blunt weapon, unless you stepped firmly with your feet, kicked off the ground, and put some weight behind it, you generated no power. This was the reason that the effects of hand-to-hand combat were weak in the Ice stage, where your feet slipped in strange ways.

  And in midair, there was no ground. Kirito could probably still swing his swords, but that fearsome power lodged within their blades would be no more.

  In contrast, Haruyuki could use the thrust of his wings to kick off the air. For instance, even if they both struck simultaneously, he would deal a far greater amount of damage.

  “This,” Haruyuki shouted, as he stared at the silhouette of Kirito, the force of whose assent slackened as he approached the upper dead point, “is the eeeeeeend!!”

  Fwoosh!! The air howled in his ears. He concentrated the force of his charge in the singular point of his right foot, and launched a long-range roundhouse kick.

  Kirito tried to catch this with the sword in his left hand, but it was easily repelled with a high-pitched noise, and the kick pushed deep into his flank.

  The black figure bounced off into space once again, and Haruyuki chased after him in another dash. Deflecting the slashing attack again with crossed arms, Haruyuki kept going, lunging forward with a head butt. He beat ferociously at the center of Kirito’s chest.

  And with that, both of their health gauges were left with 10 percent.

  He only had that much left in his flight gauge as well. But that was enough. He would finish this with the next blow. He clenched his fist with all the strength he had and started on his final charge.

  Instantly.

  Kirito’s eyes flew open. Long coat flapping fiercely, his entire body seemed to be wrapped in a pale red aura. The black longsword in his right hand radiated a crimson red light akin to blood.

  A special attack! Don’t freak!!

  Haruyuki gritted his teeth, and kept shooting straight ahead. It might have been a long-range thrust attack, but in midair, with nowhere to brace himself, it should flow off to the rear along with Haruyuki. A technique like that couldn’t pierce the armor of Silver Crow!

  “Unh…aaaah!” Haruyuki was turning his grunt into a roar when ahead of him, Kirito flipped around.

  Krrrrrr!! With a roar like a jet engine, the black swordsman launched a straight-jab piercing technique from his right hand. Haruyuki could clearly feel its incredible force as it rent the night sky rather dazzlingly.

  —And headed in the exact opposite direction of Haruyuki’s approach.

  “Wha…?!” Haruyuki gasped as Kirito took the reactive force of the fierce thrust attack and plunged forward implacably.

  The sword in his left hand burned a flash of pale crescent moon into Haruyuki’s eyes. It came slicing down on his chest. The tip touched, and he simultaneously felt heat and cold.

  Who is this guy?!

  To use everything left in his special-attack gauge not for an offensive move, but to gain a moment of thrust…Haruyuki was taken by a moment of amazement once more. However, at the same time, his mind was attempting a final counterattack.

  Haruyuki thrust his right fist directly forward, crossing the trajectory of the sword. But his reach wasn’t long enough. Reflexively, he extended his fingers and made his hand into a flat edge. His sharp fingers lined up and shone whitely, almost like a sword of his own.

  You gotta make it!! To at least tell him I fought right to the end!!

  The white sword started to pierce Silver Crow’s chest.

  His silver fingertips touched Kirito’s coat.

  In that instant, Kirito’s avatar changed into particles of white light without a sound.

  The sword lost physical form and passed through Haruyuki, as Haruyuki’s right hand slipped through Kirito’s body. The two made contact in midair and their bodies intersected.

  The instant they passed each other, Haruyuki felt like he heard a voice in his head. A soft yet clear echo, a good voice.

  “That was a good duel. Let’s fight again someday.”

  And then the mysterious Burst Linker Kirito was removed from the virtual field.

  In the center of Haruyuki’s field of view, the system text DISCONNECTION blinked lightly.

  “…to. Kazuto!”

  He jerked his eyes up to find Suguha across the dining table from him, lips pursed in a pout.

  “Oh! S-sorry! What?”

  “Your hand hasn’t really moved for a while, so I asked if you like it!” Suguha puffed out her cheeks even farther.

  “O-of course I do!” He hurriedly shook his head. “This oden’s really good.” I opened my mouth wide and shoved a piece of potato in, nodding appreciatively as I did so, but Suguha still wasn’t happy.

  “This isn’t oden. It’s pot-au-feu.”

  Are you supposed to put whole eggs in pot-au-feu? I thought, although naturally I didn’t say this out loud. I handled the situation by shoveling down whatever it was, and my plate was empty in no time, so I thrust it out in a gesture of More, please!

  As always, Mom was late, so it was just me and Suguha for supper again today. I fell silent there, and the table was quiet. But even as I started to take my second plate of French-style oden, my thoughts were always pulled back to the mysterious incident I’d experienced that afternoon.

  In the strange one-on-one fighting game field, I had gone up against the unknown avatar Silver Crow in a white-hot contest, but just before the deciding blows were landed, we were disconnected; the whole thing had happened a mere four hours or so earlier.

  I leapt out of the test machine, and of course, I rambled on and on to Takeru Higa about everything.

  And yet Higa actually got a skeptical look on his face, so I got mad and said that I would connect to the game again and rather than sword and fist, we would exchange information.

  What I saw on the second dive was…the bright woodland scene, just like Higa had told me about. There was no health gauge or timer in my field of view, and no opponent appeared. After I collected data there, just like in the initial plan, Higa and other staff members also tried diving just in case, but none of them saw any mysterious human figures.

  Right, the quantum circuit of the test machine had been “fixed.” Almost as if having witnessed the fight between me and Crow, the machine was completely satisfied…

  Or maybe that fight was a fleeting dream I had on my first full dive in the fourth-generation machine. That’s what Higa had said when my task was finished, and I was about to leave the lab.

  But I couldn’t completely believe that. Silver Crow’s movements were almost a wonder and his battle spirit was like a super-high-temperature flame. We tried to burn each other up. There was no way that duel was just a dream.

  “Come on. What have you been thinking about this whole time?” came Suguha’s voice once more, to pull me out of my head again.

  If this kept up, she would get mad at me, so I decided to bring her into those thoughts, and as I pierced a wiener with my fork, I said, “Oh, it’s just today, I dueled an amazing opponent. The connection got cut, so it was no count. But, well, I can’t really say I won.”

  “What? You ended up in a draw with an unknown player? Is there actually someone like that?” Interest piqued, Suguha also leaned forward. She seemed to have misinterpreted it as something that happened in ALO, but even if I did want to correct her, I’d sworn to keep the test mac
hine secret, which meant I actually couldn’t talk about that, so I just left it.

  “Let’s see. He flew in the sky incredibly naturally. It looked like the real deal, real flight.”

  “What do you mean?” Suguha cocked her head, and, fork still in one hand, I tried to stage it for her.

  “It’s like, in ALO, you don’t really control your wings with just your brain. You actually use the movement of your shoulder blades, right? Like this to accelerate.” I pulled my shoulders back and pressed my shoulder blades up against each other. “This to decelerate.” This time, I stretched my arms out ahead of me and pulled my shoulder blades apart. “As you get skilled at it, the motion gets smaller and smaller. But you’re still moving a little, at least. So during an air raid, no matter what, it interferes with your attack motion.”

  “Right.” Suguha nodded deeply. “When you swing your sword, you have to open your shoulders, so you end up ordering your wings to brake at the same time that you’re attacking. The only ones who can attack flying at full speed without being killed are people with lance-type weapons readied at the hip. But there’s no way around that. After all, human beings don’t have real wings. You have to substitute some other motion of your body.”

  “Right. But this guy, it looked like he controlled his wings with absolutely no conflict. After this one intense dash at full power, he accelerated even more and thrust his fist out.”

  “What? That’s impossible!” Suguha opened her eyes wide.

  I smiled slightly. “Right. It’s impossible. It probably just looked like that because he was so fast. If he could freely control just his wings, he wouldn’t be a person, he’d be a birdman. Or…”

  Or in that world, there’s a human-machine interface that goes beyond my understanding.

  Right. If, rather than picking up movement orders from the medulla oblongata like the AmuSphere, it read movement images directly from the consciousness. Or…But there was no way that could be done. Accessing the consciousness—in other words, the soul itself…

  Yet it was the only thing I could think of that would allow Silver Crow to move like that.

  Image power. In other words, a world where a person’s very will was digitized into actual power. Right. Thinking about it like that, hadn’t the test machine there read my self-image and produced the swordsman Kirito avatar that way? So then, the fourth-generation dive machine Higa made communicated not with the brain cells, but directly with the soul. Did that mean that in that world, it was possible for divers to make use of the ultimate output—the power of will?

  I closed my eyes tightly for a second before looking at Suguha across from me. I ended up grinning.

  “What are you smiling about, Kazuto?” The Sylph swordswoman speedaholic was getting annoyed.

  “Maybe someday,” I said. “No, maybe in the unexpectedly near future, we might be able to really fly. Not any pseudo, involuntary flight, but flapping our wings just as we imagine it in our hearts, yeah?”

  Suguha blinked rapidly, and then her whole face broke out into a broad grin. “Yeah, it would be great if that happened,” she agreed.

  As I chewed loudly on a wiener, in my mind, I called up one more time that figure.

  The beautiful silver crow flying through the dark night sky.

  “…yuki. Hey, are you listening to me, Haruyuki?”

  Hearing his name, Haruyuki hurriedly lifted his head. Kuroyukihime was staring seriously at him from the opposite side of the round table.

  “Ah! I-I-I’m sorry! I was just thinking…”

  “Well, what exactly is this item for investigation that is more important than discussing where you would like to go with me? I’d be very interested to hear.”

  Shrinking back with an eep, he gulped back the iced latte in his paper cup to buy some time.

  The lounge after school was deserted; there wasn’t another student to be seen. Even so, just in case, Haruyuki looked around and checked that no one would overhear their conversation before he mumbled his reply.

  “Um, well…the truth is, I dueled with this weird Burst Linker…” He deliberately left out “over lunch today.” A mysterious enemy appearing over lunch and on the in-school local net was serious, even without the Dusk Taker incident this spring. Really, immediately after the duel, he should have reported to all members of Nega Nebulus and cracked the real of this enemy, but Haruyuki hadn’t done that.

  Because he hadn’t gotten any sense of malice or even enmity from that dueler. He had only displayed the pure excitement and joy of the duel. The battle had been so fierce, and yet he had left Haruyuki feeling refreshed.

  He probably wouldn’t appear a second time. Haruyuki had no basis for believing that, but believe it he did.

  “He was weird, but he was amazing,” he said slowly. “He had two swords for weapons, and I basically couldn’t even see his techniques.”

  “Two swords,” Kuroyukihime murmured distinctly, and furrowed her brow slightly. But when Haruyuki turned puzzled eyes on her, her expression returned to normal and she continued, “Oh. No, it’s nothing. And? Did you win?”

  “Oh! Um, right before the deciding battle, the connection was cut…but if it hadn’t been, I’m sure I would’ve lost. My final blow probably wouldn’t have landed.”

  “My! To overwhelm you in close combat. What was his color and level?”

  At Kuroyukihime’s question, Haruyuki got a troubled look on his face and shook his head. “Maybe it was a system error or he was using some kind of filter, but I couldn’t see his color name or his level. Just…looking at him, he was incredibly…black.”

  Faced with the Black King narrowing her eyes slightly once more, Haruyuki, still not thinking too deeply, casually asked the question that had come up during the battle. “Oh, right. I meant to ask you a million times before. What kind of attributes does ‘black’ have, anyway?”

  Kuroyukihime blinked, puzzled, and then smiled a wide, wry grin. “Where’s that coming from all of a sudden?”

  “Oh! S-sorry.” When he unconsciously shrank into himself, a smile like that of one a wise older sister would turn onto a thoughtless younger brother crossed her lips.

  “No, no need to apologize. Because the answer is, I don’t know, either.”

  “Huh?”

  “That said, I have made certain suppositions.” Her glass of iced tea clanking, Kuroyukihime began to explain, her eyes turned to the hazy light of the afternoon sun. “On the color wheel, there’s close-range blue, long-range red, and intermediate yellow. And then green and purple with attributes in between there. Except for the metal colors, pretty much every duel avatar is categorized in this wheel. The greater the saturation, the purer the affiliation.”

  All of this was laws Haruyuki also knew very well. For instance, Cyan Pile, controlled by his good friend Takumu, was a fairly vivid blue, but he tended just a tiny bit toward the purple direction. This was why his initial armament Cyan Pile did double duty with long-distance attack power.

  As if reading Haruyuki’s mind, Kuroyukihime nodded as she continued, “Conversely, the lower the saturation, the more the affiliation is particular. Your friend Ash Roller is a green type, but he’s so gray, you basically can’t tell. That’s because a large part of his potential has been poured into the special Enhanced Armament of his bike. But even with the same lowering of saturation, why do some avatars go darker and others go lighter? That still hasn’t been properly explained.”

  “Some get darker…some lighter…,” he parroted, and Haruyuki finally got it. The end of an avatar getting darker and darker was, of course, black—pure black. Conversely, at the end of getting lighter was white—pure white. Both had the ultimate in specificity, but in that case why were black and white split up as total opposite colors? He didn’t have a clue.

  Haruyuki twisted and craned his neck, and Kuroyukihime spoke abruptly, clearly, “Black is the color of refusal. Or so I thought for a long time.”

  “Huh? R-refusal?”

  “
Yes. It refuses to be dyed with any hue. It is a nihilistic color, possessing nothing. You can’t go any further than that. The color of the bottom of a deep well.” Her words were cold, but Kuroyukihime shook her head before Haruyuki could open his mouth to say anything. A faint smile bled onto her pale lips. “But…but lately, I’ve been feeling that maybe that’s not the case. And that’s because…” Abruptly, she slid her slender hand across the table and squeezed Haruyuki’s. “…You have held my hands like this countless times. Because you made me remember that even someone like me can have that contact with another person.”

  Faced with eyes gentler than he had ever seen, Haruyuki turned red right up to his ears, but still, he managed to resolve himself and squeeze Kuroyukihime’s cool hand. His heart was pounding, and it didn’t seem like he was going to be able to say something really appropriate, so he tried earnestly to communicate everything in his heart through their touching fingers.

  Black definitely isn’t the color of refusal. I mean, you, you were the one who reached a hand out to me alone at the bottom of my pit. You wrapped yours gently around it; you healed my wounds.

  Right. And him, too. That black swordsman had the same sort of composure somehow. He had a strength and breadth to accept and support all things.

  Haruyuki lifted his face timidly, as if pushed from behind by the Kirito in his memory and managed to get something akin to words to come from his mouth. “Um. Uh, I was taught in class that black things look black because they don’t repel any light. So…so it’s definitely not a sad color. I think it’s bigger and warmer than any other color.”

  Kuroyukihime’s eyes flew open wide for a moment. And then a smile like the bud of a lotus flower unfolding spread across her face.

  AFTERWORD

  Reki Kawahara here. I’m bringing you Accel World 10: Elements.

  …Well, I’m aware it’s a bit late for this, but it is the tenth volume. This story was born from the simple, single idea of “it would be interesting if there was a fighting game that used the real world as a stage,” but then I thought that a few minutes into a carefree fight, you’d be hit by a car, so I added the element of “acceleration” and started writing. Once I began writing down all the various other elements of the story, things sort of snowballed.