Shrine Maiden of the Sacred Fire

by Reki Kawahara

  Maybe this is what it feels like to protect someone, he thought absentmindedly, measuring his steps along the elegant residential area path lit by the streetlamp LEDs.

  The idea had never before crossed his mind, but one day in the distant future, the time would come for him to exercise his right to copy and install the Brain Burst program. Which meant that, as a “parent” Burst Linker, he would choose someone to be his “child,” and he would watch over and raise a little level-one chick, completely unaware of the ways of the world.

  What if, supposing, maybe, that person was a weak-ish younger girl like Utai Shinomiya here? No, take it one step further: What if Utai was my child? Would I be able to do the right thing as her parent? Would I be harsh at times, and then kind, and protect and guide her?

  I could do it. I should be able to do that. I mean, I managed to say I’d carry her bag and all. And I’m totally matching her pace. Aah, it’d be so great if we really were parent and child.

  His thoughts rambling and racing in this fashion, Haruyuki had already completely forgotten the weighty truths he had been informed of less than an hour earlier.

  Making him aware of this heedlessness was the sudden movement of Utai’s fingers as she walked next to him and hesitantly typed out, UI> MY HOUSE IS JUST AHEAD. AND SO, I WANTED TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO ASK YOU THE TINIEST OF FAVORS, ARITA.

  The feeling of false parenthood still with him, Haruyuki read this, blinked, and then bobbed his head up and down. “S-sure. Anything!”

  UI> I REALIZE THAT YOU’VE BEEN SO KIND AS TO WALK ME HOME AND NOW I ASK FURTHER FAVORS OF YOU.

  “It’s fine. Totally fine. Fire away!”

  UI> THANK YOU SO MUCH. THEN I WILL TAKE YOU AT YOUR WORD AND INDULGE MYSELF.

  “Y-yeah. So…what?”

  UI> PLEASE SHOW ME YOUR ACTUAL ABILITIES. I WISH TO CONFIRM WITH MY OWN EYES WHETHER OR NOT THIS “PLATINUM CORVUS” IS TRULY SOMEONE WORTHY OF BEARING THE FIRST SPEAR OF NEGA NEBULUS BEFORE I FOLLOW SACCHI’S PLAN.

  “…Sorry?”

  Snap!

  Haruyuki froze in an awkward position with an unnatural look on his face, while before him, Utai slipped her backpack off, opened the flap, and stuck her hand inside before quickly pulling it out again. Clasped in that small hand was an equally small, off-white Neurolinker, with a matte texture like fired pottery.

  Watching as she lifted her ponytail with her left hand and set the quantum device on the nape of her slender neck, Haruyuki finally arrived at the facts that he had so completely forgotten.

  Utai Shinomiya was a member of the first Nega Nebulus and one pillar of the Elements, the Legion’s main force, essentially one of the Four Heavenly Kings. Also among this elite was Sky Raker, all of which meant that far from being a level-one chick, she was a Burst Linker probably—definitely—far, faaaar stronger than Haruyuki.

  He was still frozen in place when Utai tugged at his shirt near his waist and invited him to one of the benches set evenly along the lane. He sat down half on autopilot, and she dug around in her backpack again for a few seconds before pulling something out. An XSB cable for direct connections covered in white plastic.

  Offering one end to Haruyuki, Utai typed out deftly with her left hand, UI> WILL YOU FIGHT ME ONE-ON-ONE? OR PERHAPS YOU’D PREFER TO JOIN TOGETHER AS A TAG TEAM AND FIGHT ANOTHER TEAM TWO-ON-TWO?

  Haruyuki’s response came in half a second.

  Tag team, please.

  The promenade bench on which Haruyuki and Utai sat was at the real-world address of Icchome, Omiya, Suginami Ward, and in an area known as Suginami Area Two in the Accelerated World. Because it was neighbored by the “duel spots” of Shinjuku in the east and Shibuya in the southeast, it was on the sparsely populated side. But the hours from six to eight in the evening were the time of day when the most duels happened, and nearby Kannana Street housed several large dive cafés, so there should have been at least twenty or so Burst Linkers on the matching list.

  Connected to Utai by a meter and a half of XSB cable, Haruyuki watched the wired connection warning appear and disappear as he clenched his hands on his knees and straightened his back. The girl five years his junior fiddled with her virtual desktop in a relaxed manner, the expression on her face essentially unchanged. She was likely launching the BB console and setting Haruyuki—Silver Crow—as her tag team partner.

  UI> ALL RIGHT, THEN: I’LL SELECT AN APPROPRIATE TAG TEAM TO GO UP AGAINST. I’LL TAKE A SUPPORTING ROLE IN THE OPENING, SO PLEASE, ARITA, FIGHT HOWEVER YOU SEE FIT. IF YOU’RE PREPARED, WE CAN BEGIN.

  “O-okay! Go ahead!” he replied, mouth dry, and turned his full gaze on Utai’s glossy lips. Naturally, he wasn’t doing this as some kind of harassment, but rather to shout the “acceleration” command at the same time as she did.

  But then Haruyuki came up against a question he hadn’t previously considered. Utai Shinomiya had expressive aphasia. She couldn’t speak using her physical voice. How on earth could she say the command for the Brain Burst program?

  The answer was exceedingly simple.

  Utai abruptly closed her eyes. A narrow valley was carved out between her eyebrows, and her slightly parted lips shook, almost convulsing. Teeth clenched beyond those lips creaked. One and then two beads of sweat popped up on her forehead. It was a feat of strength. She was goading her body to force out a voice that couldn’t come.

  Haruyuki desperately swallowed the word—stop—that tried to leap out of his mouth. If Utai was such a high ranker as to be one of old Nega Nebulus’s Four Heavenly Kings, then she would have had to have been through an almost uncountable number of battles to claw her way to that position. And they couldn’t all have been from Standby mode. This girl had to have done this thing that looked so absurdly difficult over and over, an infinite number of times.

  It probably didn’t take more than five seconds, but to Haruyuki, the struggle felt like it went on for minutes, until in the end, Utai’s lips opened two centimeters. They were then pursed and farther opened to the sides. Finally, she pointed them slightly once more.

  Bur. Ssst. Lin. K.

  Although completely soundless, Utai’s actual mouth did in fact carve out those syllables. At the same time, Haruyuki muttered the words with his usual awkwardness.

  6

  As if it had never been, the damp heat of the rainy season turned to a dry, cold wind and caressed his body. Beneath his duel avatar’s mirrored helmet, Haruyuki snapped his eyes open. This moment when he checked the attributes of the stage was exciting, no matter how many duels he fought.

  However, just then, he had something in his heart that was double, triple, quadruple the concern. So the instant he saw the fiery sunset and the sea of golden grass swaying in the wind, he realized it was a Grassland stage and immediately spun his body around—and swallowed his breath when he saw this quadruple concern in the center of his vision: the appearance of the duel avatar operated by Utai Shinomiya.

  To a certain extent, it was what he expected: a fairly small avatar. But she had a dignified silhouette that made the avatar feel larger, fitted with long shields hanging below her arms and an armor skirt that spread out, covering the area from high up on her waist down to her feet. Combined, the armor looked almost like a white robe and red hakama—a traditional Japanese outfit.

  Furthering the impression was the fact that the top and bottom halves of her avatar had almost entirely different coloring. The torso and the arms were a graceful, semiglossy off-white, like her Neurolinker. But the hakama armor was a concentrated red, with both depth and brightness, different from the pure red of the first Red King, Red Rider, and from the transparent crimson of the second Red King, Scarlet Rain. Like the form of the avatar, this red was somehow Japanese—vermilion, perhaps.

  The head looked very much like the real Utai’s. A fringe-shaped armor covered the forehead of the white mask, and a long stabilizer stretched out from the rear of the head. Eye lenses the same brilliant red as the hakama were clear and severe, yet cute.

>   Haruyuki had never before seen a two-tone avatar. It went without saying that Silver Crow was entirely silver, and the other members of Nega Nebulus were a single color. It wasn’t that there weren’t avatars with multiple color schemes, but the majority were simply different shades of the same color. The reason for that was that the color name of the avatar equaled the attributes of the avatar, which equaled the body color. The color name was always one word, and the color expressed was inevitably limited to one—or it was supposed to be.

  Utai’s avatar standing neatly before Haruyuki, however, had her lower half wrapped in a fairly pure long-distance red and her upper half in a similarly saturated, peculiar white; each color represented fairly different attributes. What kind of color name could express both in one word?

  Haruyuki forced his eyes away from the Japanese-style avatar and checked the name attached to the second of the two health gauges in the top left of his vision. Ardor Maiden. That was Utai Shinomiya’s avatar’s name.

  He understood maiden. Like a young lady or a virgin. And that was actually pretty fitting for Utai. But he couldn’t immediately translate into Japanese with his own brain the key to it all, the color name, the English word ardor. If he had been in the real world, all he would have had to do was focus his gaze on the word to make a translation window pop up, but unfortunately, that sort of useful function did not exist in Brain Burst. He felt like it was a word he’d seen somewhere before, but he was pretty sure at least that it hadn’t been a word in any of his English textbooks before eighth grade.

  He gave up on asking what her name meant, since it was just too stupid, and finally checked his tag team partner’s level. Seven. So fairly high indeed.

  Having spent approximately three seconds collecting all this information, Haruyuki lowered his head. “O-okay, then, I appreciate your help. I’ll try not to disappoint you.”

  When he lifted his head again, he had the sudden thought. Just like it didn’t have a translation function, Brain Burst wasn’t equipped with a text chat feature, either. How on earth were they supposed to understand each other? Sign language? Or maybe eye contact?

  But as soon as this thought struck him, Utai responded in a way that made Haruyuki doubt his eyes—or rather ears. “Looking forward to it. And you don’t have to be so polite all of a sudden, C.”

  C? Does she mean me? Like C for Crow?

  Wait, that’s not the real issue here. Right now, I’m sure, there’s no doubt—she spoke. The mouth area of Utai’s avatar Ardor Maiden moved, and I heard a voice.

  “Ah! U-um?! Sh-Shino—no, wait, uhh, what should I call you here…”

  “Anything except Den Den is fine. In the past, I was mostly called Mei.”

  “O-okay…Mei, uh, just now, you…talked.” In his immense surprise, Haruyuki ended up being fairly impolite, but Utai showed no sign of being bothered by this as she nodded crisply.

  “I can speak like this only when I’m accelerated. In fact, you could say that that’s one of the reasons I visit this world now.”

  Inside the innocent childishness and clarity of her voice was a strength that cut to the core. Compared with Haruyuki’s rattling speech, which wasn’t much different from him in the real world, her voice was crisp, as though she had taken voice training, with an overwhelming smoothness and rich inflection.

  “B-but being able to talk in this world…I thought it was the same mechanism as talking in neurospeak with your Neurolinker…”

  “I don’t know the detailed theory behind it, either. Black Lotus once said it was because of the depth of connection with my consciousness, which is different at a quantum level.”

  “O-oh…I don’t actually get what this is, either.” Cocking his head, Haruyuki took in the full picture of Utai’s duel avatar once more.

  Even though just the combination of the vivid white and vermilion was beautiful on its own, paired with the Japanese hakama, he almost felt a seed of holiness there, like his soul was being pulled in. Or maybe there was a reason for that—this color and form together called to mind something that existed in the real world. Something he’d seen somewhere a long time ago. He was pretty sure it was before his parents got divorced, and the three of them went out at New Year’s…

  “Um, C. Although I don’t especially mind how long you look at me…”

  “…It’s…a big shrine…first visit of the New Year…”

  “I don’t particularly mind if you do your first shrine visit of the year in June, either.”

  “After we prayed, we got our fortunes…Huh, I was the only one to get terrible luck…”

  “The guide cursor has been moving quite energetically for a while now.”

  “Pretty sure I lost big in that one…Huh?!” Utai’s voice finally reached his brain, and Haruyuki hurriedly activated the light blue triangle displayed faintly in the center of his field of vision. It was indeed rapidly changing direction from right to left. And what lay beyond this arrow was, of course, the enemy.

  After all, this beautiful grassy field was not a virtual space for chatting, but rather a duel stage produced by Brain Burst.

  “Crap! They’ve gotten pretty close!” Hurriedly readying himself, Haruyuki checked the enemy tag team in the lower right of his vision.

  One was a level four, Olive Grab. He was pretty sure this avatar was a member of the Green Legion, but he didn’t know them.

  Haruyuki gulped the instant he saw the other name: Bush Utan. Level three and also a member of the Green Legion, he was a Burst Linker Haruyuki had fought a few times before. But whenever Utan had appeared in Suginami, it had always been paired up with the motorcycle-using Ash Roller, whom he adored like a big brother.

  Haruyuki cocked his head slightly to one side, but he soon pushed aside the weirdness of it. Bush Utan probably couldn’t make the timing work out with his big brother every time. At any rate, from the way the guide cursor was swinging, the enemy was already closing in hard, within twenty meters. Just a bit more before contact—or it should’ve been.

  “Wh-where are they?!”

  Standing on his tiptoes, Haruyuki stared intently in the direction indicated by the cursor. However, there was nothing but tall grass swaying in the wind as far as the eye could see—no sign of any enemy avatars. They were probably making themselves as small as possible and moving along against the ground under the grass like they were swimming.

  As he whirled his head around, Utai next to him whispered, “C, it seems the enemy team’s split up into advance and rear guards. I’ll keep the rear in check; you handle the advance. Let me see what you’ve got.” And then she quietly pulled away to the right.

  Utai prepping him for battle like this and appearing before Haruyuki and his friends now after her long retirement probably meant she was involved in Kuroyukihime’s Armor of Catastrophe purification plan. Apparently, Utai was going to watch this battle very closely to determine whether or not she would help.

  In which case, he had to at least show her a solid victory, even if he couldn’t manage an easy win, but that wasn’t going to happen if he couldn’t even find the enemy. His opponent seemed to be approaching in spiral to the left and would already be in the ten-meter range before he knew it. When that happened, the guide cursor itself would disappear. Straining his eyes even more desperately, Haruyuki still saw absolutely no difference between grass swaying in the random wind and grass swaying because of the enemy.

  Right, the sound!

  He abruptly closed his eyes and focused every bit of his attention in his ears. There should have been the slightest difference between the noise of the enemy parting the grass and the rustling caused by the wind. He would listen for that.

  Two seconds later…

  “They sound totally the same!” Haruyuki groaned and opened his eyes again. The ksh-ksh-ksh sound effect was essentially uniform in all directions. There might have been the tiniest difference in it somewhere, but he would need some kind of miracle training to be able to pick up on it.

/>   Eyes no good, ears no good. If he used his wings to ascend, he probably would have been able to find his opponent, but his special-attack gauge was still empty, and there were no objects he could smash anywhere around him.

  He was gritting his teeth at his mounting frustration when the guide cursor abruptly disappeared from view. Or more precisely, one of them did; another very faint cursor remained, but that was for the enemy rear guard some distance away and no use to him now.

  The advance guard—it wasn’t clear whether it was Bush Utan or Olive Grab, but whoever it was was currently moving somewhere within a ten-meter radius of him and planning the timing to hammer Silver Crow with a serious advance attack. Haruyuki could also try creeping along the ground himself here, but if he did, he would lose his mobility, Silver Crow’s greatest weapon, and there was a serious possibility that he would get pulled into a ground skirmish.

  If this had been a normal duel, this would have been the point where he abandoned everything he’d been thinking up to that point and braced himself to be slammed down in the beginning of the fight, all so that he could fill his gauge and bet the rest of the duel on the strength of his wings. It was practically his standard fighting style, in fact. Because Silver Crow couldn’t take much of a hit and hit his breaking point quickly, he was not suited to fighting on the ground. He was at a disadvantage when he couldn’t fly, and obviously…

  From somewhere in his heart, the thought continued. Utai Shinomiya had said she wanted to see Haruyuki’s actual power. And his actual power meant his true abilities. And really, he had had no excuses or reason to hold back. Above all else, success or failure of the purification plan hinged on this duel.

  Is that really my only option? I have to have something else I can use to deal with this, don’t I? The moment the thought came to him, a single idea flashed in his heart like a bolt of lightning.