Shrine Maiden of the Sacred Fire

by Reki Kawahara

  “Excuse me, may I speak?” another voice interjected, just as the Purple King was about to refute the Yellow King once more.

  Politely raising a hand was the ivory avatar seated on the left end of the semicircle, the representative of the White King, Ivory Tower. When all eyes turned toward him, he dropped his left hand. “Before we debate what measures to take, shouldn’t we find out how something like this happened? Who on earth is this Burst Linker who released the Incarnate in the middle of an event and pulled even the Gallery into the Space Corrosion, and what is their objective?”

  Silence ruled the meeting venue.

  The name and membership of the problem Burst Linker. Haruyuki already knew these. But he was incredibly reluctant to give voice to them here. Because in talking about that mysterious organization, he would inevitably have to touch on the Burst Linker who called himself its vice president. But the color that crowned that player was the same as a certain swordmaster he loved and respected more than anyone else—a pure black. If the kings knew that, it was obvious they would suspect a connection.

  “Rust Jigsaw, a member of the organization Acceleration Research Society. That’s the name of the Burst Linker who carried out the Incarnate attack at the event.”

  “Ngh?!” Haruyuki caught his breath the instant he heard the brilliantly clear voice.

  It was Kuroyukihime. Without the slightest fear of suspicion being cast on herself, the Black King proceeded smoothly. “We don’t know the full story on the organization, but they called themselves a ‘circle’ rather than a Legion. The other confirmed members are Dusk Taker, who has already left the Accelerated World, and one more—”

  “Hold up, Lotus.”

  Just as she was on the verge of announcing that third name, a single voice interrupted her sharply.

  It belonged to the Red King, Scarlet Rain, occupying the seat to their right. With her arms crossed over her chest, she emitted an air of intimidation out of proportion with her small body, the smallest of anyone there.

  You’re throwing us a life raft, huh, Niko? Haruyuki thought, and the tension ran out of his shoulders.

  However…

  An aura like the flames of hell flew from the roundly cute eye lenses that glanced at them, and Haruyuki stopped breathing.

  “If you don’t take care of the other item on the agenda, I can’t keep sitting here. We got someone not fit for the threat of Incarnate blah-blah right here. Someone living inside the avatar with a cursed power that was supposed to be completely gone, the darkest side of the ultimate Incarnate.”

  3

  “Come on! Back to your seats! Extended homeroom’s starting.”

  Some students grumbled at their homeroom teacher clapping his hands together. “What?! The bell hasn’t even rung yet. Stick to the schedule.”

  “Okay, then, anyone not in their seat the instant the bell rings gets extra homework! Come on, it’s going to ring—it’s gonna ring, you guys! Three, two, one…”

  Haruyuki listened, chins propped up in his hands, to the ringing of the sixth-period bell and the clattering of students scrambling for their seats.

  On the other side of the window, a drizzling rain colored the city gray. According to the weather forecast, the end of the rainy season was still two weeks away, but he had the end-of-term examinations to look forward to right after that, so he couldn’t really muster up any impatient desire for the rain to stop. Of course, if he could make it through the exams, the brilliance of summer break awaited him, but he would need a lot more training before he could manage to be upbeat enough to sustain any kind of anticipation over such a long time frame. He sighed heavily simply thinking about the classes (especially gym) and homework (especially essays) that would assault him in the week ahead.

  At least with homework, he could noodle and dawdle and drag it out and still get it done right before it was due if he made a power play and used a burst point. In those final thirty minutes he gained from acceleration, he could mow down any amount of homework, an ability so incredible that even honors student Takumu was stunned and exasperated. “Why don’t you just use that kind of concentration normally?”

  But he couldn’t use an intense burst of acceleration to similarly clear his schedule of the classes crammed into his days, morning to night. In fact, when he was dragging his exhausted self around the track in gym class, he even had the sense that a deceleration function was actually at work. Maybe there really was. According to the operating principles of Brain Burst, the thought clock was accelerated by an increased heart rate, extending subjective experienced time. So maybe if he trained so that his heart didn’t pound so hard when he was running, gym class would feel shorter than it did now. All right. He’d try dropping the Chinese Kenpo training app he had been using and do some chakra-type special power training or something.

  These useless thoughts ran through Haruyuki’s mind as he looked out the window without really seeing anything while the voice of his homeroom teacher went in one ear and out the other.

  “…It’s been two months now that you’ve been in this class. And now’s about the time when you start to lose focus. See? On this graph, lateness and lost items, starting in April…”

  Normally, the last homeroom was precious time when he worked out his duel plans for after school. What area he’d go to, what kind of techniques he’d try, who he’d fight, or whose Gallery he’d sit in while they fought. For Haruyuki, who loved simulations, this was a fun exercise even if it had no effect on his actual duels. Usually, homeroom was over in the blink of an eye, a pleasant surprise, but today, time’s march was ridiculously slow.

  The reason was obvious.

  Haruyuki had been backed into a corner; he had no room for plotting out duel plans. The pressure he was under now was even, in a certain sense, greater than when he had his flying ability stolen two months earlier, teetering as he was on the edge of a cliff. Was his time as a Burst Linker almost over?

  After the meeting of the Seven Kings ended the day before, Fuko dropped Haruyuki off close to his home. Although he managed to meet her and Kuroyukihime’s encouragement with a smile, he did indeed drop his head and count the tiles of the sidewalk as he trudged home along Kannana Street.

  Head still hanging, he got into the elevator and rode up to the twenty-third floor. After walking down the silent hallway to his condo, just as he was in front of the door about to touch the UNLOCK button shown in his field of view, Haruyuki noticed a small figure crouching in the corner of the doorway and stopped dead in his tracks.

  Bright T-shirt with some logo on it, slim-fit jeans. Faded sneakers on bare feet. Despite the rough appearance, he quickly realized it wasn’t a boy. The hair tied up on both sides, red like fire, shone lustrous even in the gloom of the hallway.

  “N-Niko?” Haruyuki said her name, dumbfounded, and the small girl slowly raised her face, a daring and yet somehow powerless smile crossing her lips.

  “Yer late. We supposedly left the Chiyoda Area at the same time, but here I am, waiting for ten whole minutes.”

  “S-sorry,” he apologized reflexively, and she shrugged sharp shoulders lightly.

  “Well, Pard did give me a lift on her bike, so it’s no wonder I was faster.”

  “Th-there’s no way I could catch up with her. A-anyway…why are you here?” Haruyuki asked, blinking furiously.

  Niko looked away momentarily and snorted lightly. “This is gonna take a while. You wanna hear the whole thing in the hallway?”

  “O-oh, sorry.” Haruyuki hurried to touch the UNLOCK button still displayed before him. The door of his deserted-as-always apartment opened, and he politely invited her in, to which Niko responded with a long sigh before putting both hands on her knees and standing up.

  After showing his surprise guest to the living room, Haruyuki got two glasses of orange juice in the kitchen and returned, only to cock his head anew.

  The younger girl seated on the sofa, looking out at the clouds on the other side of the windows
, was indeed someone he had met many times before, Niko aka Yuniko Kozuki—ruler of the Legion Prominence, the Red King, Scarlet Rain herself. But why? He had not only exchanged anonymous mail addresses with her, but also call numbers, so she had any number of ways to get ahold of him. And more than that, sitting with her knees clutched to her chest, in the corner of the entryway of someone she had business with, was the polar opposite of what he expected from Niko.

  As he set the juice down on the glass table, Haruyuki stole another peek at the small face in profile. He could see no sign of the usual sparkling energy in her lightly freckled cheeks. On the contrary, he felt like he could see an unease of sorts in them. It was hard to believe this was the very Red King who had spoken so sternly at the meeting earlier. Her sharp voice came back to life in the back of his head.

  We got someone not fit for the threat of Incarnate blah-blah right here.

  “Sorry. For saying it like that, I mean,” Niko muttered before him the instant he recalled the intense heat of her recrimination, her crimson flames, almost as if reading his mind.

  “Huh? O-oh, no, it’s—” Having sunken into the sofa, he sat up again and hurriedly shook his head back and forth. “I—I was surprised at first, but Kuroyukihime and Raker explained it later, so…They said you brought up the subject of my—I mean, the Armor of Catastrophe parasitizing me then because we couldn’t let any of the other kings, especially the Yellow King, take the lead on this.” He rushed to get the words out, and Niko blinked a couple times before a wry smile bled into her large eyes, which looked reddish brown or green, depending on the light.

  “Tch! So they saw through me. Honestly, nothing to love about those two.” Cursing, she leaned back into the sofa, crossed surprisingly thin legs, and dangled a slipper from the tip of her bare foot.

  Relaxing slightly at this change in demeanor, Haruyuki cocked his head lightly to one side and asked, “Wait, have you and Raker met before?”

  “Nah. The meeting there was the first time we’ve come face-to-face. I’ve just heard stuff about her from Pard.”

  “S-stuff? Like what?”

  At the question, a broad, meaningful grin spread across Niko’s face. “You know where her nickname ICBM comes from?” she asked in return.

  “Huh? It’s not just from her boosters sort of looking like missiles…?”

  “There’s that, but that’s not the whole story. It actually comes from this tactic the old Nega Nebulus used once in a while in large-scale Territory Battles. They would deliberately push up to the enemy team front line and scatter their fighting power. Then Raker, either alone or carrying someone as support, would fly into the enemy’s rear base with her boosted jump. And ’cause the only armor in the rear’s basically paper, super-long-distance types, they did serious damage with this strategy, the sort of damage you’d get from a missile.”

  “…R-right.” Haruyuki nodded, unconsciously breaking out into a cold sweat despite the fact that the person behind this clever attack was his own ally.

  “And you know how Pard is a speed demon.” Niko’s expression softened as she continued, almost as if she were recounting her own memories. “Whenever she got hit with that missile strategy, she’d head straight to the rear and duke it out with Raker. Over and over. Seriously. I mean, we’re talking about the main force of a Legion we got a cease-fire with, but she was so happy Raker’d come back to the front…You know what, Crow? Pard’s a fairly longtime Linker, but she’s still only at level six and…”

  Here, Niko fell silent, so Haruyuki finally leaned forward. The doubt in her was one he’d sensed several times in the past. “‘L-level six and’…?”

  “Nah, it’s a secret. Ask the girl herself later.” Grinning, she offered a quick “Thanks” as she lifted the glass from the table.

  He could no longer see the curious helplessness in the little—apparently thirsty—girl as she took big, glugging gulps of the juice. Maybe it had just been his imagination, he thought as he replied, “I totally feel like she wouldn’t tell me even if I did ask…Well, anyway. So, Niko, did you come all the way over here just to apologize for the thing in the meeting?”

  “What? You don’t have to sound so put out.” She glared at him over the rim of her glass, and he hurried to shake his head.

  “N-no! I’m not put out! It’s just sort of out of character, I guess. Oh, uh! I didn’t mean it like that, it’s, um, actually I’ve been thinking for a long time that I’m the one who should apologize.” Unable to stop the spinning of his mouth once it had started moving, he awkwardly turned into sound the idea he had been planning to communicate in a more polished form. “I-it’s just, we worked so hard to destroy the Armor in Ikebukuro, and then I go and make a stupid mistake and now it’s still around. And on top of that, you had to give the old owner, Cherry Rook, the Judgment Blow, but I’m still here being a Burst Linker—”

  Haruyuki’s words did not entirely miss their mark, and Niko listened with a serious face. Eventually, however, she shook her head lightly and interrupted him. “Nah.” The young king set her glass down, crossed her legs again, and sat back deep in the sofa. “I’m not holding a grudge against you or anything for that. I didn’t give Cherry the Judgment Blow because he was the owner of the Armor. I did it because he was swallowed up by the Armor’s controlling power and then he attacked—no, devoured—a ton of Burst Linkers. If Cherry had maybe been able to make the Armor surrender and control it with his own power, I would have done the opposite. I would’ve protected him. No matter what the other kings said…yeah…” Niko’s voice slowed unnaturally.

  Haruyuki blinked and looked at the pale face turned to the floor. The same dark shadow he had seen outside in the hallway again clouded her large eyes, a deep green at that moment. This time, Haruyuki understood what it was: fear. And anger at herself for being afraid. And a tiny bit of resignation. The look that must have come onto Haruyuki’s own face in the past at those times when he clutched his knees, unable to do anything under his own power.

  “N-Niko.” He called her name in a strangled voice.

  The girl raised her eyes momentarily and then dropped them again with a weak smile. “I had the power to actually protect Cherry. I’ve believed that these last six months. But, the thing is…” Abruptly, she clutched the arms poking out of the sleeves of her T-shirt tightly. Almost like she had been overcome by a fierce chill in the middle of the sweltering June heat. “Crow. You didn’t feel it at the meeting?”

  “F-feel what?” Haruyuki timidly asked in reply.

  “That inside those kings there,” Niko—the second Red King, the Immobile Fortress, Scarlet Rain—groaned in a cracking voice, “are real monsters. That information pressure…It’s impossible…Like, I really planned to just protect you there. I mean, I owe you for saving Cherry for me. So, like, I proposed that compromise at today’s meeting. But…if they had seriously pushed for execution, I…” She shut her mouth and pulled her knees up onto the sofa.

  For a while, Haruyuki could say nothing to her in reply. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe it right away; he just couldn’t actually understand it. The fact that Niko was calling another Burst Linker a monster, complete with a look of real fear…

  To Haruyuki, the Red King was an absolutely elevated presence. He was convinced that they could fight a hundred times under the same conditions, and he would lose each one of those hundred times. The dreadnought long-distance firepower she had when she deployed all of her Enhanced Armament was no doubt one of the greatest attack powers in the Accelerated World. After all, with one shot of her main armament, she had sent half of the Shinjuku government building flying.

  But even in just her small avatar body, equipped with a single handgun, Niko’s strength was fathomless. At the meeting of the Seven Kings, Haruyuki had in fact felt an enormous pressure from the Red King, one that did not pale in any way in comparison with that of the other kings.

  “Th-that’s…” Haruyuki finally rebutted her hoarsely, shaking his head in
several short jerks. “I mean, for me, every single person in that place was up in the clouds, but I can’t believe there was anyone there who could make you say that. I—I mean, you’re a level niner just like them, right? ‘Same level, same potential,’ that’s the main principle of the Accelerated World, right?”

  The redheaded girl glanced at Haruyuki over her small kneecaps and moved her head slowly from side to side with a bitter smile. “Exceptions to every rule, you know. Listen. For all intents and purposes, level nine’s the cap for Brain Burst. ’Cause no matter how many points you earn, you can’t get to the next level from there. The road to level ten is hunting five other level-nine Linkers…which basically equals making five people lose all their points. To put it another way…”

  She dropped her eyes once more and said softly, “No one else knows how much time you’ve spent in the Accelerated World, how much experience you’ve had after getting to level nine. I thought those other kings couldn’t beat me on that one. I thought I had the power to at least not have the things I lost in the real world taken from me again in the Accelerated World. But…that was wishful thinking. Those guys, the ‘originators,’ have transcended stuff like the hurts I’m clinging to. And if you don’t call that monstrous, what is it…”

  “…‘O-origin’…?” Baffled, Haruyuki could only repeat to himself the unfamiliar word. But Niko simply set her cheek down on the knees she had her arms around and offered nothing in the way of reply.

  The living room fell back into silence, with just the faint hum of the air conditioner reaching his ears. The cloudy sky beyond the windows was concentrated lead, and headlights began to pop on here and there in the lanes of EV vehicles flowing along Kannana.

  Niko went to a boarding school, and she would soon be in danger of breaking curfew, but the body curled up before him showed no signs of moving. Even the hair pulled up into thin bundles on either side of her head hung limply, as if it had lost its usual vigor.