Armor of Catastrophe

by Reki Kawahara

  “Yes, that’s exactly right.” Ardor Maiden nodded crisply, and Haruyuki stared into her scarlet eyes before deliberately opening his mouth again.

  “Mei. I have a proposal. I don’t have any real reason or confidence, but…I want to try heading for the inner sanctuary. I don’t know why, but…I think we can make it.” As he stared at the child shrine maiden cocking her head slightly, his own avatar, which had been sitting cross-legged on the gravel, shifted to sit properly on its knees without his being aware of it. He clenched his hands lightly on his knees, straightened his back, and continued speaking.

  “Naturally, I get that the worst-case scenario is we’re killed by some Enemy stronger than those warriors and get stuck in an Unlimited EK in the Castle. I know we shouldn’t risk that danger on a gut feeling. But, still, I want to go…I kinda feel like…we maybe…have to go…”

  It was a fair bit of work for Haruyuki to get all this out, and toward the end, his voice turned into his usual mumble, and his shoulders started to drop. There was no way he’d be able to persuade a very veteran Burst Linker two levels higher than he was.

  “Understood.” Utai nodded.

  “What?!” he cried out in surprise.

  The shrine maiden let a little laugh out and, while still kneeling, deftly moved to bring her knees right up alongside his. From this position, she reached out with her right hand and gently placed it on top of his clenched fist.

  “C. Back there, you ignored Lotus’s order to retreat, and you rescued me when I appeared on the altar, all while being chased by Suzaku’s flames. In that instant, I understood that you are a person I can trust—someone I should trust. No, actually, perhaps I knew it from the time we first met, from the time I saw you all alone in the yard at Umesato Junior High School, so earnestly cleaning out the animal hutch.”

  “Th-that’s—I mean, I, like, totally, it’s just…” Haruyuki hung his head deeply, his usual stammering reaching new levels. “I never think—I always mess up. I mean, that time cleaning, I totally sprayed you with water.”

  Perhaps remembering it, Utai let a giggle slip out and held Haruyuki’s hand even more tightly. “I believe I told you: that true strength is moving forward without giving up, even if you lose or fall down or fail. If we are killed by Enemies aiming for the depths of the inner sanctuary, I have faith that you will manage something there.”

  They were kind yet harsh words. But Haruyuki lifted his face and firmly met Utai’s eyes, glittering brightly before nodding deeply.

  “Yeah. I’ll work something out. We’re going home alive…to everyone waiting for us in the real world.”

  3

  The cobblestone main road continuing from the south gate of the Castle—which was named Suzakumon—to the main entrance of the inner sanctuary was approximately three hundred meters long. Standing on both sides every eight meters was a vermilion pillar. Since the pillars themselves had a diameter of two meters, the gap between each pair of pillars was six meters. The warrior Enemies patrolling the main road didn’t appear to notice the existence of the intruders when they were hiding quietly behind a pillar, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that the instant the warriors saw them moving or heard the sound of footsteps on gravel, they would swoop down upon them.

  Thus, to make it to the inner sanctuary of the Castle, the only choice Haruyuki and Utai had was to cross from the shadow of one pillar to the next of thirty-five pillars while avoiding the warriors’ reaction range. Naturally, Haruyuki’s first inclination was to consider using his wings for an aerial approach, but the falcon-like birds dancing slowly in the night sky concerned him. If they were some of the harmless critter objects, simply one part of the stage’s terrain, it would be fine, but he and his partner would be in serious trouble if they turned out to be some kind of lookout Enemies.

  Nevertheless, his wings weren’t entirely useless. Crouching in the shadow of the umpteenth pillar, holding the small body of Ardor Maiden in his arms, Haruyuki listened hard and waited for his moment.

  Warriors marched south along the main road five or so meters to their left, armor clanging. Those weighty footfalls came up directly beside the pillar, passed by, and receded farther.

  Utai, in his arms, nodded her tiny head. At the same time, the metal fins on Haruyuki’s back fluttered with the minimum output, and lightly, soundlessly, the pair flew—or rather, jumped. They landed gently on tiptoe behind the pillar eight meters ahead. The warriors behind them continued to walk away at the same pace, not seeming to notice anything out of place.

  “Phe…” He suppressed the sigh that started to slip out, and Utai turned worried eyes on him. He looked back into those ruby-like lenses and nodded that he was okay.

  He had a certain amount of experience fighting Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field, but this was the first time he had been forced to engage in covert action that used so much mental energy. In more than twenty minutes, the distance they had covered was at most a hundred meters. However, they couldn’t rush this. He had to concentrate and make a perfect jump each time.

  It was a difficult situation, but luck was also on their side. To begin with, there was the fact that Haruyuki’s flight was not a special attack that required him to utter the name of the technique in order to activate it, but rather a normally activated ability. Thus, they didn’t have to worry about the warriors hearing his voice.

  And one more piece of luck was that holding his breath and hiding himself was real-world Haruyuki Arita’s big signature move. Of the three hundred and sixty people at Umesato Junior High, no one had polished their Inconspicuous skill to the extent that Haruyuki had. The seemingly paradoxical trick to this was to sneak out in the open. Because Haruyuki had been excessively bothered by the eyes of the students around him back in seventh grade, he had provoked the sadism of some delinquents. Nothing was ever good in excess.

  Right: careful guard, but without fear; join the natural flow—complete the next jump.

  His precious special-attack gauge, filled up when he was scorched with Suzaku’s flames, had about 60 percent left. If he used it well, that would be plenty. If he flew steadily between one pillar and the next without rushing, he’d reach the finish line at some point. A lesson he’d learned cleaning out that animal hutch.

  A new group of warriors approached and passed by on the other side of the pillar. Utai nodded. Haru nodded back and gently vibrated his wings. Jump.

  Forty minutes later, when they had finally reached the base of the last of the pillars, Haruyuki let out a long, heavy sigh of relief this time.

  The patrolling warriors apparently didn’t come up to the side of this pillar. After checking that there was no sign of any Enemy around them, Ardor Maiden, in his arms, whispered at minimum volume, “Very nice work, C.”

  “Yeah. You, too, Mei.” He let the slender avatar down gently onto the gravel. Huddled together, crouching, they cautiously peeked out from the shadow of the pillar.

  The inner sanctuary of the Castle, the very center of the center of the Unlimited Neutral Field—the true Accelerated World—rose up a mere five meters ahead of them. Given that this was the Japanese-style Heian stage, the design of the building also closely resembled the reproduction model of the Council Hall of the Imperial Palace in ancient Kyoto, which he had done a full dive into in his Japanese history class. It was just much, much bigger.

  The roof was black tiles. The walls were painted white, and the pillars and latticed windows were vermilion. To their right was the main entrance, leading off from the center of the main road. But going in through there was probably—no, definitely—impossible. On either side of the gate stood Enemies far more massive than the courtyard’s warriors; they were fearsome, imposing, and perhaps best described as two guardian Deva kings.

  “C, I have to ask at least. Are you planning to challenge those people?”

  At Utai’s whispered question, Haruyuki moved his head at high speeds, horizontally, back and forth. “N-n-n-n-n-no way, y-y-y-y-y-you gotta be
kidding! I don’t want to get another centimeter closer to them.”

  “…Neither do I. But…then what exactly are you planning to do? I do believe that we won’t find a portal without going into that inner sanctuary.”

  “…Um, okay.” Beneath his helmet, he bit his lip for a moment. He didn’t know if she’d believe him if he told her what they were going to do and the basis for that action. However, Haruyuki didn’t want to tell any kind of lie to this girl, Utai Shinomiya, still so childlike and innocent despite having borne a massive weight on her shoulders for more than two years. Which is why he simply told the truth.

  “When I was dozing back there under the pillar at the southern edge, I had a dream. Someone who looked a lot like me but who wasn’t me took the exact same route as us and got into the inner sanctuary.” He still couldn’t fully remember all the details of that dream. But when he saw that vision of the silver avatar moving forward across the gravel, the part that came after that returned hazily to life in his mind.

  Ardor Maiden stared at him curiously as he put a hand on her right hip and stood her up with him. Holding her gently, he raced his eyes around to the left and right to check it was safe. He used the tiny bit left in his gauge for the final long jump.

  He was aiming for not the main entrance to their right but the latticed windows along the white wall—specifically, the one fifth from the left.

  When he landed immediately in front of the window, which itself was a careful hatching of vermilion crosspieces, Utai took a step forward and then turned around, shaking her small head.

  “It won’t open, I think. And it’s almost certainly impossible to break it—this type of window is almost always an unbreakable object, locked by the system.”

  She was absolutely correct. Unlike the Normal Duel Field, which was a straightforward fighting-game stage, the Unlimited Neutral Field that the Brain Burst program generated was more role-playing game, good for strategizing and adventuring. Pretty much any building in the Normal Field could be destroyed, but that was not necessarily the case in the Unlimited Field. Just like a locked door wouldn’t open unless you had the key that fit it, if you didn’t have a reason to go inside places closed off in this world, the system would most certainly not let you.

  But Haruyuki simply half nodded at Utai and looked up at the latticed window. He reached up and grabbed a thin vermilion crosspiece. Please, he prayed as he gently pulled it forward.

  Sure enough, the latticed window rotated soundlessly with the central crosspiece as the axis.

  Utai took a sharp breath. Her scarlet eye lenses opened wide as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  It was only natural she’d be surprised. On the inside of the latticed window, on the bottom, a hefty lock glittered gold. But the bolt had been completely opened, showing that this window was in an unlocked state, according to the system.

  Ardor Maiden took a few steps, still saying nothing, and reached up to the next latticed window. She tried to pull it open in the same way, but the vermilion crosspiece stayed firmly fixed to the window frame, not even bending. Clearly, only the fifth window had been unlocked from the inside by someone.

  “Did you also dream that this window would be open?” Utai asked him hoarsely, having returned to his side.

  “Yeah.” Haruyuki nodded slightly. “In my dream, someone got in through this window, like they slipped through it and opened the lock.”

  “Was that someone the same person who broke the seal on the south gate?”

  “I…don’t know. But I feel like there wasn’t a bit like that in my dream. And the person I saw maybe didn’t have anything swordlike,” he replied, almost absently, as he searched his memory intently. But they were talking about a dream he’d had while napping. All that came to mind were confused fragments of images; he couldn’t even put them in chronological order. Maybe if he had had the dream recorder app that all the Neurolinker companies were working on, it would have been a different story, but even still, that would have only worked in the Basic Accelerated Field, where you could launch external programs.

  But, more important, had it really been just a dream?

  Dreams were essentially something produced from your own memories. So he shouldn’t have been able to see anything in a dream that he didn’t actually know. This was obviously the first time Haruyuki had entered the Castle. In which case, where did the memory that this window was unlocked come from…?

  Haruyuki had gotten this far when a faint sound reached him from the east, and he turned his gaze with a gasp. The clanging drew nearer on the narrow path between the courtyard of trees in autumn brilliance and the endless white wall. There was no doubt it was a group of warrior Enemies. Apparently, this path was also a patrol course, albeit an infrequent one. They had to move right away.

  After meeting each other’s eyes for half a second, Haruyuki and Utai nodded together. They couldn’t go back now, not when they’d come so far. Haruyuki first poked his head in through the unlocked window and checked that there were no Enemies inside the wide hallway. He slid gently inside before reaching out to pull Ardor Maiden up with both hands. Without a moment’s delay, he closed the lattice, and they crouched below it, side by side.

  The heavy footfalls on the gravel of the lane outside passed by, turned near the main gate, and passed by once more before disappearing back into the east.

  “Phew…” At the same time as he let out yet another sigh, they looked at each other again, gently bumped fists, and grinned.

  Finally.

  They had at last succeeded in entering the inner sanctuary of the Castle itself, famed as being impenetrable. They were drawing infinitely closer to the center of the Accelerated World. Unfortunately, however, it was almost certainly a fact that another Burst Linker had made it this far before them. And if the person who destroyed the Suzaku seal on the south gate and the person who unlocked the latticed window here were not one and the same, there had actually been two intruders before them.

  If they wanted to know who those other Burst Linkers were, their only choice was to head even farther into the inner sanctuary. The fearsomeness and number of the guardian Enemies here was likely an order of magnitude higher than outside, but all they could do was keep moving forward.

  “Umm.” Haruyuki blinked hard once before quietly asking, “How much real time has passed since we dove here?”

  “I’d estimate that it’s been about seven hours of inside time, so twenty-five thousand, two hundred seconds divided by a thousand…about twenty-five seconds.”

  “Okay, then it’s probably been about twenty seconds since Kuroyukihime and the others got back. How long you think they’ll wait before pulling our cables out?”

  “At the earliest, I think they will force a disconnect at thirty seconds. Another ten seconds in real time…Here, we have two hours and forty-five minutes left.” Utai’s prompt response was just what he’d expect from a veteran Burst Linker; Haru was still not that great at mentally calculating accelerated time.

  He bobbed his head up and down. “We either make it all the way in alive, or we die along the way. Either way, that much time’s plenty. Let’s go, Mei. Going to the right is probably safe.” He sat with one knee raised and stretched out his left hand.

  Utai stared at him for a moment, scarlet eye lenses glittering in her snow-white face mask. When he cocked his head to one side, she spoke in a voice colored with a smile. “It’s just that since we got here, I’ve steadily felt more and more like I could rely on you, C. Almost like…my older brother.”

  Having something like this sprung on him sent his awkward meter shooting through the roof in the blink of an eye. “Wh-what? Mei, you have an older brother? What grade’s he in?” he asked shrilly, eyes frozen in place.

  But Utai grabbed his hand and stood up without responding to this question. Once more, a thin smile crossed her face, this time lonely somehow. “Well then, shall we go? Whether we live or die…I leave my life in your hands,
C.”

  “…Yeah.” Pushing aside his confusion, Haruyuki nodded firmly.

  He was the one who had insisted on aiming for the inner sanctuary. So he had to give his all to keep Utai safe now. As a Burst Linker, Utai was overwhelmingly the stronger one, but this was a different sort of problem. Even if he had to sacrifice himself, he wanted to make sure Utai at least avoided falling into an Unlimited EK state again.

  Secretly resolving this to himself, he started walking along the wooden floor of the silent, cool hallway, when a tiny voice came back to life in his ears.

  Look, big brother Haruyuki. If one of us—or maybe both of us—lose Brain Burst, we’ll probably forget everything, everything about each other, you know…

  This wasn’t a fragment of that strange dream. These were the words of Yuniko Kozuki—the second-generation Red King, Scarlet Rain—when she suddenly showed up at his house after the Meeting of the Seven Kings. It had been held in the east gardens of the Imperial Palace in the Normal Field two days earlier in real time, on Sunday, June 16. She had looked scared somehow. Or, given that she was saying things like lose Brain Burst, maybe she actually had been afraid of something.

  But what? Did anything actually exist that Niko—a top-level Burst Linker at level nine and one of the Seven Kings of Pure Color ruling over the Accelerated World—would have to be afraid of? Considering the fact that in addition to the terrifying firepower of her Enhanced Armament, she had also mastered the Incarnate techniques of Range Expansion and Movement Expansion, she should have been able to escape from even the territory of Suzaku under her own power.

  Still, she might have been a king, but Niko was a sixth-grade girl in the real world, so it was no wonder if she got anxious about things sometimes. And in the Armor of Catastrophe incident six months earlier, she had herself condemned to exile Cherry Rook, a Linker close to her who had become the fifth Chrome Disaster. Rook had apparently been one of the few friends she had at her real-world boarding school, and now he had lost his memories of Brain Burst and transferred to a school far away. It would have been strange if she wasn’t a little lonely.