This is bad. This is super bad. If I get the answer wrong now, there’s no coming back.
In the back of his mind, several sensational headlines flashed past. He could hear somewhere the battle cries of the members of the Kuroyukihime fan club seeing them and calling for blood.
One cheek spasming and twitching, Haruyuki set his brain to work—three times more accelerated than when he’d been fighting Ash Roller—deriving a response that wasn’t entirely inoffensive.
“Uh, th-th-that was…okay. I—I—I just know a bit about her Neurolinker OS, so uh, her Neurolinker was weird in this one place, and she asked me to fix it. That’s all. The café thing was nothing more than her thanking me. That’s it. Nothing more. Not in the slightest.” With a tight smile on his face, he shook his head briskly.
The newspaper club girl stopped typing and knitted her eyebrows.
There shouldn’t have been any way that she could check whether people directing were having a conversation in neurospeak or whether they were just operating their Neurolinkers. As an excuse, it strained credulity, but she shouldn’t have been able to find anything to disprove his story.
Relieved, Haruyuki added new bricks to further build on the wall he had created. “I—I mean, if you saw how she is when she’s with me, you could tell. When we talk, she gets into a bad mood pretty quickly. So there’s, like, no way we could be dating or anything.”
And that should be the end of this interview.
Or so he thought, but the girl tilted her head and returned doubtfully, “Bad mood? It didn’t look like that at all, though.”
“I-it’s true! I mean, this morning, she got mad and stormed off. She always gets like that when Chiyu, I mean Kurashima, comes up.”
“Kurashima…? I’m sure she and Kuroyukihime talked about something in front of the school gates.” After blinking rapidly several times behind her glasses, the theatrical journalist disappeared from the newspaper club girl’s demeanor, and her fingers raced. The recording icon disappeared from Haruyuki’s view.
“Is the interview over?”
“Oh. Yeah. Or rather…,” she mumbled in a strange tone. After exchanging a glance with her partner behind Haruyuki, she started talking in a normal tone. “Okay, look. The truth is, we weren’t actually buying into that rumor at all. To be blunt, we figured it was some kind of mistake, which is why we came to interview you.”
“Huh?”
Bringing her face in close, the girl whispered so that only Haruyuki could hear. “Hey, Arita. I mean, it’s kind of crazy, but…maybe Kuroyukihime and you are really…you know?”
“Huh?!”
“I mean, look. You’re close with Kurashima, and whenever you talk about her with Kuroyukihime, she gets in a bad mood. That’s, well…you know?”
The other club member, who had come around to the side again, picked up where her associate had left off. “Yeah. I mean, no matter how you look at it…”
Then they both whispered at Haruyuki like shrine maidens uttering an oracle. “She’s jealous, right?”
When he came to, Haruyuki was in his usual stall in the boys’ washroom. Which meant that he had run away again, but he didn’t have a drop of energy to spend regretting his actions.
Jealous? How do you write that character? Ugh, too hard, I don’t know.
In an attempt to allow his thoughts escape, too, he was already drawing possible characters, one line at a time, in stark red like a brand.
Kuroyukihime has that sour look every time we talk about Chiyuri because…she’s jealous.
That’s what they had said.
Jealous. Envious. In other words, Kuroyukihime wasn’t putting on a show or joking around, she really—
“No way,” Haruyuki muttered, his thoughts racing ahead. There’s no way. Maybe that could happen to someone else, but it could never happen to me, not to Haruyuki Arita. Don’t even think it. Don’t hope. You’re obviously just going to be squirming with double, no, triple the regret later.
Hitting the back of his head against the water tank, Haruyuki spoke aloud again. “No way…No way.” But the more he said it, the more the many things Kuroyukihime had said and done, the many faces she had shown him up to then broke into an infinite number of pieces and played back like a slide show in his mind.
That time…and that time, and that time, she was seriously—
“No way!!” He slammed his right hand against the stall wall and held his head.
Thinking about all this was just making him crazy; he needed to get even farther away. Just as he was about to give the command for a full dive, the insanely high score Kuroyukihime had managed jumped back at him from his memory.
He would never be able to beat that score. Which meant that he couldn’t use the game as an escape from reality anymore.
“…Why?” In a slightly louder voice, he shouted again, “Why?! Why me?!”
You have everything. Looks, ability, popularity. And even the one thing I was proud of—reaction time in a virtual game. And me, I’m nothing but a loser with a dumb face and a squishy, sweaty body. I lose to you in every single possible way.
“And yet despite all that…how am I supposed to believe…”
It’s true Haruyuki had the aptitude for Brain Burst that Kuroyukihime was looking for. But that didn’t mean anything other than there were only three such people at their school.
And Haruyuki’s Silver Crow was totally good for nothing, an enormous helmet head plopped onto a gangly wire body that could only punch, kick, and head butt. With a duel avatar like that, about the only thing he could do was help her unearth the true identity of her enemy, Cyan Pile. So he wished she would treat him that way. He wanted her to just give him cool, dispassionate orders, like she would any servant.
He didn’t want anything more than that. He was absolutely not deluding himself into thinking he could have anything else. And yet…why did Kuroyukihime take that attitude, get that expression on her face, look at him with those eyes?
Finally, wanting only to ease his mind, Haruyuki latched on to a single conclusion. He couldn’t come up with any other reason for her behavior.
Haruyuki missed lunch again even though he didn’t have anyone taking his lunch money anymore, but he wasn’t even aware of his empty stomach as he sat disinterestedly through afternoon classes.
In homeroom, their teacher had apparently said something to Araya and his gang, but he missed that, too, and when the last bell rang, he sluggishly stood, bag in hand, after his classmates had flown out of the classroom, full of anticipation for the weekend. He headed for the entrance slowly, changed to his outside shoes, and left the school.
Even though it was still only just after three, the late autumn sun was already fading and shone on the school gates at a steep angle. Seeing a black silhouette standing as if transformed into one of the pillars, Haruyuki dragged his feet as he approached.
“Hey.”
Kuroyukihime’s hands—which were busy typing on a holo keyboard—stopped, and she raised one hand slightly, a faint, hard smile on her face. She had probably deliberately come to stand out here in the cold even though what she was doing could’ve been taken care of in the student council office.
Haruyuki could only dip his head silently in response.
An awkward silence ensued. A chilly wind rustled the fallen leaves at their feet and then passed on.
He kept his head down, and Kuroyukihime started speaking after lightly clearing her throat. “Can we talk while we walk?”
“Yeah.” Haruyuki accompanied this brief reply with a nod.
She started to walk silently, and he took a position to her left and a step behind as they passed through the gates.
They had been walking silently for a couple minutes when Kuroyukihime cleared her throat again and began speaking. “Look. I’m sorry about this morning. I was being weird.”
“No, it’s fine. I wasn’t upset. I’m sorry I didn’t come during lunch.”
Kuroyukihime
seemed to tilt her head slightly at this unusually smooth response but then nodded. “It’s fine. But. Even I wonder what I’m doing, but…when it comes to Cyan Pile, I just can’t seem to stay calm—”
Kuroyukihime sounded somewhat rushed, keeping her eyes forward as she spoke, and Haruyuki cut her off in a dry voice. “About that…I know the connection between Kurashima and Cyan Pile.”
“What? Oh…r-right. Then let’s talk about that over direct. It wouldn’t do to have someone overhear the names,” Kuroyukihime said quickly and reached into the bag hanging from her right hand instead of her pocket.
She pulled out a small paper bag stamped with the name of the Umesato student shop. After tearing the tape off sharply, she pulled a brand-new XSB cable out of the bag. “I accidentally burnt out the one we’ve been using so far. And…they didn’t have much stock, so I had to buy this one.” She sounded almost as if she was making excuses as she pulled out the one-meter cable—the shortest they sold in the student shop—and Haruyuki tried not to think about what was going on in her head.
Without meeting her eyes, he silently accepted one of the plug ends and inserted it into his Neurolinker.
Kuroyukihime looked like she was waiting for him to say something, but finally, she put the other plug into her own Neurolinker. The wired-connection warning appeared, and as it disappeared, Haruyuki sent dry thoughts at the girl on the other end of the wire.
“Kurashima isn’t Cyan Pile. It looks like Cyan Pile actually set up a virus in her Neurolinker to make a back door. Which is why they show up from wherever Kurashima is in the school.”
Kuroyukihime didn’t immediately respond to Haruyuki’s torrent of words, but when she finally did, the voice in his brain sounded doubtful. Or just a little scared.
“What…what’s going on with you? Since before…you’ve been kind of weird.”
“Nothing. Nothing’s going on,” Haruyuki responded, obstinately refusing to turn and look at Kuroyukihime walking next to him, a meter away.
“But…are you maybe mad? Because I was weird this morning. And yesterday.”
“As if. There’s no way I could be angry with you. Don’t worry about me; we have more important things to talk about, don’t we?”
Once again, only silence passed along the thin cable.
On the road as dusk approached, because of the group of buildings standing along the left side of the path, people passing along it sank into black shadows in the dim light. No eyes fell on Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime walking together and directing, making it seem almost as if the two of them alone had somehow wandered into a country of flat shadows.
“Do you have proof?” Changing suddenly, the voice in his head was cold. “Did you get proof that Kurashima is not Cyan Pile?”
“No. If I reached out to the virus, Cyan Pile might have noticed, so I just looked.”
“I see. A calm decision, but at the same time, not very persuasive. Even I have never heard anything about a virus that connects you to the Brain Burst matching server through a back door. How exactly am I supposed to believe what you’re telling me?”
The sharpness in her thoughts seemed to swell with each word enunciated. Haruyuki clenched his teeth and sent an even flatter voice through the cable. “So you’re saying I made up the virus story. Are you actually trying to say I’ve gone over to Kurashima-slash-Cyan Pile’s side? If that’s the case, then proof or whatever doesn’t matter. You’re just going to have to decide what you believe.”
“I’m not saying that. You’re leaping to conclusions.”
Haruyuki stubbornly refused to respond to Kuroyukihime’s slightly shaken words.
“Are you saying this because you really believe it?” Her legs stopped in place suddenly, and her voice, which had gotten even colder, sounded hard. Haruyuki stopped, too, before the cable went taut. “The moment I conclude that you’ve aligned with Cyan Pile, I will hunt you. I will take your meager burst points, and I will press you toward a forceful uninstallation of Brain Burst. You will lose the ability to accelerate forever. Are you fully aware of this as you tell me this now?”
“I understand. You’re free to do what you will. I’m just a pawn, just a tool. Throw me away when you don’t need me anymore.”
“You.” She lightly took hold of Haruyuki’s left shoulder. When he lifted his eyes, Kuroyukihime’s face, strained like carved ice, was very near. However, her pitch-black eyes alone reflected the feelings inside, burning almost white hot.
“I knew you were angry. And it’s true, I’m to blame. I apologize. But…” Lips trembling almost imperceptibly, she pushed out a voice that sounded like she was forcing it under control. “It’s not as if I can freely control all of my emotions. I get annoyed, I get uneasy. And when it comes to you and…Kurashima…” Her gaze dropped momentarily, and, pale cheeks stiffening, Kuroyukihime continued. “Look, if you want me to tell you why, I will. I—”
Before that thought could travel down the cable, Haruyuki turned to the side and cut in. “It’s fine. Let’s just forget it.”
“Ah. Wh-what?”
“Watching this is hard, too. It’s just sad.”
“What are you talking about? What do you mean?”
Fixing his gaze on a single paving stone to his lower right, Haruyuki finally gave voice to the “only conclusion” he was able to reach that afternoon. “You…you hate yourself, don’t you?”
The sound of a sharp intake of air.
Haruyuki was suddenly self-conscious about the words he had loosed, words he couldn’t take back. In the depths of his ears, the encouragement Chiyuri had given him the night before played like a refrain, but he could no longer stop the thoughts being uttered.
“You hate yourself, the you who’s too perfect in every single way. Which is why you’re trying to lower yourself. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Kuroyukihime’s fingers, resting on his left shoulder, stiffened, turned to steel. Thinking that would likely be the last time she ever touched him, Haruyuki unleashed his final words, which were sure to destroy everything. “You, me…Talking to me, a fat, clumsy loser, touching me, showing me something like…something like kindness—it’s just you trying to dirty yourself. You don’t need to do all that; I’ll still do what you want. I don’t want anything. I don’t need any compensation. I’m just a sacrificial pawn, a tool to be ordered around. A guy like me, you should know exactly what the proper way to handle me is!!”
The pale hand slipped slowly, slowly from his shoulder.
This was how it had to be.
Never touching him again, never meeting his eyes.
As long as you make me your tool, we don’t even ever have to meet in the real world. Haruyuki didn’t know if this thought reached her as neurospeak or not.
Good-bye.
As he went to murmur this final word, a sharp sensation snapped across his left cheek. Haruyuki lifted his face in shock, cheek burning.
“Idiot!” The voice burst forth with real sound from the light-colored lips.
Haruyuki stared baffled at the waterfall of tears flowing down that beautiful face, distorted to the point of violence.
Her right hand still high in the air, Kuroyukihime’s entire demeanor crumpled like a child’s, and tears streamed down her face.
“You idiot…idiot…” The word repeated now sounded almost entirely different from the fool paired with a wry grown-up smile that he had gotten from her so many times before.
Kuroyukihime cursed Haruyuki over and over and over, age-appropriately, like a fourteen-year-old girl.
And Haruyuki simply stood, eyes wide open, unable to think of a single one of the several reactions he should have had as a thirteen-year-old boy. With his words, he had deeply hurt the person before him. That much he understood.
But when it came to Kuroyukihime, when it came to this person who was so perfect in every way, who had an ability to think and reason greater than any adult, he thought she was just disgusted with Haruyuki. She had exhausted her soc
ial graces; her heart was just being pulled away.
But crying this much. And she looks so fragile. This—this isn’t how it was supposed to…
Haruyuki opened his mouth as if to speak.
Kuroyukihime wiped away flowing tears with both hands.
For a moment, only the wind passed over them as they stood there stationary together on the road in the deepening twilight.
And then a terrible sound like metal scraping against metal hit Haruyuki’s ears.
At first, he thought it was a quantum noise through his Neurolinker, the sound was that strange. Baffled and heart pounding, he swiveled his head and torso around to the right.
And had a terrifying spectacle leap into his field of view.
A white passenger car was plunging straight at them, removing in the process the guardrail separating the sidewalk from the road with the right front fender.
An accident?! No! There’s no brake noise. The series of ideas flashed through his mind in less than one tenth of a second.
His mouth moved basically on automatic, and a single phrase surged out. And at the same time, the exact same words echoed in the back of his brain in a different voice via the direct cable.
“Burst link!!”
With a cracking noise like lightning, the world stopped.
Blue.
The landscape frozen, clear and blue as far as the eye could see.
But Haruyuki quickly understood that this didn’t mean everything had stopped completely.
The tires of the large sedan filling his view were turning bit by tiny bit as if fighting the freezing, biting into the road surface and closing the distance.
“Wha?!” Haruyuki cried out finally, and jumped out of the way. Instantly, the car disappeared. Hiding it was his own round back clad in the uniform of Umesato Junior High.
This blue world was just the real landscape, recreated as a polygonal pseudo-reality by the Brain Burst program hacking into the images from the social security cameras, placed in great numbers around the city. Dropping his gaze, he saw his body had changed into the pink pig. He moved the familiar virtual avatar to cut around his own real-world back and looked again at the white sedan.
Kuroyukihime’s Return Page 13
