“Wh-whaaaaat?! N-no, no, I can’t. Seven people is too much!”
“Ha-ha-ha! I was kidding! A joke!” Niko turned off angel mode and released Haruyuki before jumping down behind him. She whirled her head around and said in a completely different tone, “I’ll be your taxi to Marunouchi. Huge freebie for you. Step back a little, yeah?”
“Huh? O-kay…”
She had said “taxi,” but Niko’s main body was the smallest of any of them; she looked like she might have been just barely able to carry Maiden. However, with all of her Enhanced Armament deployed, just as her nickname Immobile Fortress would have it, she was tens of times bigger, but her mobility was lacking.
Haruyuki and the other six members of the Black Legion all cocked their collective heads to the side, but Pard casually got some distance, so they followed her example. Left alone in the middle of the grounds, Niko thrust her right hand up and shouted, “Equip Invincible!!”
Instantly, her small body was wrapped in a pillar of red light. A throaty roar shook the air, and a massive object materialized in the space around her. Niko’s body floated up into space in the middle of missile pods, gun blocks, armaments for both sides, armor plating with thrusters for her rear, and four massive limbs, and then, with an even more remarkable roar, the equipment fused together.
He had seen this any number of times, but Haruyuki was always overwhelmed by this might, so befitting the name Red King. Still, her figure, essentially transformed into a fixed fort, was a far cry from a taxi, no matter how he looked at it.
But.
Niko, enveloped in the center of the armament squad, her eye lenses alone shining, shouted another voice command in a high-pitched voice. “Change: Dreadnought!!”
Once more, a low roar shook the earth. The leg-part blocks sticking out on all four sides rotated and fused, two in the front, two in the back. The angled gun block in the front slid forward, and the missile pods were tucked away behind it. In the very rear, the thruster-equipped armor was stored. The main armaments to the right and left were attached to both sides, and finally, a total of twelve thick tires appeared beneath the leg blocks. What existed before Haruyuki’s eyes was no longer a fixed gun battery, but a massive armed trailer that easily surpassed a total of ten meters in length.
Gaping, dumbfounded, Haruyuki thought abruptly, Oh, is that it?
This was the new power Niko had mentioned the previous evening: Acquiring the ability to move while still maintaining a certain level of firepower—not an immovable stronghold, but a Mobile Fortress.
Pard turned toward the frozen Black Legion members, raised her thumb, and jerked her hand up. Then she leapt upward without a sound onto the top of the trailer, nearly three meters above the ground.
Haruyuki and his friends looked at each other and nodded before jumping up, one after the other. Finally, Haruyuki used his wings to carry the wheelchair with Fuko sitting in it and landed on the flat armored surface. The top was much wider than it had looked from below, with plenty of space left even after all seven of them were on board.
“I do still think this isn’t a taxi,” Utai murmured, and everyone bobbed their head in agreement.
Not seeming to pay any mind to this remark, Niko, tucked away in the front of the trailer, shouted forcefully, “So we don’t run into any huge Enemies or other Burst Linkers, once we get past Kannana, we’ll blast down back roads! So hang on tight!”
“Uh, um, Niko, seats or seat belts or at least a strap to hang on to…”
“Don’t be such a wimp. I’m not a taxi! Wohkay! Off to the Castle. Here! We! Goooooo!”
The engine—Which is where? Haruyuki wondered—roared, and the massive trailer jumped forward, smoke peeling up from all twelve tires. In the blink of an eye, they were cutting diagonally across the Umesato Junior High grounds, and they pulverized what had once been the school festival gate as they pulled out onto the road.
Once they had gone just a little bit north, they turned right, drifting on twelve fearsome wheels. They had no sooner flown onto Oume Highway than they began to charge east with enough force to crush the asphalt road surface.
Leaning forward against the acceleration, Haruyuki lifted his face and stared into the night sky dead ahead. From far-off Suginami, he couldn’t actually see it, but below this sky was the Castle, guarded by a Super-level Enemy, and Tokyo Midtown Tower, holding the main body of the ISS kits.
Curren. Today, I’m going to pay you back for helping me that time. And Ash, Kusakabe…Hang on just a little longer. We’re going to end this. We’ll make Rin’s suffering go away.
“…For sure!” Haruyuki affirmed to himself, clenching his fist tightly.
On his forearm, he spied the light-conducting crystal that was proof he’d obtained the Optical Conduction ability. For just a moment, it collected the light of the hazy night and shone brightly.
To be continued.
AFTERWORD
Thank you for reading Accel World 13: Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge.
I gave this book that subtitle with the meaning of a signal fire going up on the very edge of the border. In other words, the sign of the counteroffensive has been shot up and will pull on into the next volume. Since the Armor of Catastrophe arc took several books, from six to nine, I think the Metatron arc will take at least three, but it might just end up being the same four volumes long. I’m not planning to go all the way to five volumes…No, I definitely won’t! I swear it on the ISS kit shining in my chest!
All of which means that this volume is one in which problems aren’t really resolved (and in fact, they increase in number), but Aqua Current, one of the Four Elements—and who first appeared in the story “The Sound of Water on a Distant Day,” collected in Volume 10—was able to come back to the Legion, so I’m relieved at the long-awaited increase in battle power. And, well, I won’t deny that it’s unfortunate that one element of the character, the fact that she is level one, will be so quickly reversed, although this is an inevitable development given the course of the story (lol). But I would like to be able to tell the story of why she continued to work as a bodyguard and stay at level one for such a long time and her motivations for that in the next volume.
And one other thing in this volume I finally got to write about was the Umesato Junior High school festival, which had been foretold by just its date a fair while back. For the festival, I tried to write in a style of depicting the details of an event one after another, something I don’t really do, but I was a little unsure about it, so I put the question, “How does this style of writing work…?” to my editor, and she replied, “Actually, this is the usual in a light novel,” and I thought, “Oh, I get it!” Since basically all the AW heroines are together (for some reason, Kuroyukihime alone isn’t there…), I do hope you had fun with it.
In the Territories in the middle again, as the rival team members, I had the pleasure of introducing avatars that I received during the campaign for duel avatar proposals. Thank you so much to Uda, who designed Blaze Heart, Yuno for Ochre Prison, and Uraomote Yamaneko for Peach Parasol! In putting them into the story, I took the liberty of doing some fine-tuning of the avatar names and abilities. I appreciate your understanding.
When Volume 13 is published, more than a month of 2013 will have passed, and I suppose it will be the time when all kinds of things start to settle down. I’m writing this afterword in December 2012, so I’m looking back on a tumultuous year as I tap at the keyboard.
The Accel World anime started airing in April and finished in September, but with all the preparation, meetings, and writing of small additional pieces, I was involved with the anime version for nearly two years. The hard parts were hard, but I gained so much from the experience. I’d like to make use of all of that to continue to write with the aim of even more interesting stories. I do hope you will continue to have the same unwavering support for Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime and all their friends in 2013 as well!
Reki Kawahara
On a certai
n day in December 2012
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Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge Page 22
