Armor of Catastrophe

by Reki Kawahara

  At the same time, he understood just how much pressure he had been under with the situation facing Silver Crow. The terror that he might not be able to stay in the Accelerated World, the way it pushed down to the depths of his soul without him being aware of it.

  Haruyuki shook even more intensely, and Kuroyukihime, embracing him as though she were trying to wrap up his entire body with her arms, murmured smoothly by his ear.

  “It’s okay, you’re not alone. I’m here. Your Legion comrades are here, too. And the Red King, Rain; Leopard; the Green Legion’s Ash Roller; the Blue Legion’s Frost Horn and the others; and so many more Burst Linkers are eagerly awaiting your return.”

  “…Right. Right…” Nodding intently, Haruyuki realized that at some point his own short arms had pulled Kuroyukihime’s body closer as well. But he didn’t feel any embarrassment anymore. Their thought clocks, moving at a speed a thousand times that of reality, were synchronized; they melted into each other and became a single being, sharing even their emotions.

  Several seconds passed, pregnant with curious emotion, until finally Kuroyukihime gently pulled away from him. Her face regained a slight bit of its usual severity, and eyes like the night sky also grew serious. When she spoke again, her words were entirely unexpected.

  “Which is why, Haruyuki, there is no need to be afraid of strange rumors. It’s not possible that the ISS kits currently spreading the infection through the Accelerated World were generated from you.”

  After taking a sharp breath of virtual air, Haruyuki asked in a small voice, “Did you already know about them, about the kits?”

  “Mmm. Utai explained it to us when Fuko drove us home yesterday.”

  “She did…huh? I’m sorry I was late to report—”

  “No, actually, I should be reproached for not noticing what was happening sooner. After I got home yesterday, I hurried to collect information. Given the method and timing, we should suspect their participation. The Acceleration Research Society, the ones who destroyed the Hermes’ Cord race.”

  As she spoke, Kuroyukihime moved toward a sofa set transformed into blue ice and sat Haruyuki down before taking the seat next to him.

  Sitting neatly on his knees, Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down. “Yeah. That’s the same conclusion Taku and I came to yesterday. And Taku said he’d do some looking into it himself. But he’s actually home sick with a cold today.”

  “What?” Kuroyukihime furrowed her brow and fell silent for a while, as if in thought. Looking up at that face, Haruyuki felt his earlier irrational unease filling his heart again.

  I’ll try some tricks of my own to get information on the ISS kit thing.

  That’s what Takumu had said at the end of their conversation yesterday before going home. Tricks of my own. Did that mean connections he alone in Nega Nebulus had—the pipeline with his old Legion, the Leonids?

  The instant his thoughts reached this place, Blood Leopard’s words from that morning came back to life in his ears: The biggest risk for outing in the real is information leaked by a “parent” or “child.”

  “Ah!” Haruyuki cried out, snapping to attention, and Kuroyukihime turned surprised eyes on him. Staring at her face, he gave voice to the idea welling up inside him. “Um…Kuroyukihime, Taku’s parent was someone fairly high up in the Blue Legion, but they’re already gone from the Accelerated World because of a Judgment Blow, right?”

  “Oh, mm-hmm. I believe the one who reported that to me was you yourself. For the offense of distributing the backdoor program Takumu once used, that Burst Linker was beheaded by Blue Knight, the Blue King. I remember finding that altogether natural, since Knight’s very fastidious about such things.”

  “Right. But I’m pretty sure at the time, they didn’t know who the first one to use the backdoor program was. In which case, maybe they’re still alive and well in the Accelerated World.” He broke off and squeezed Kuroyukihime’s hands tightly with his own hooves before continuing. “The problem is…the guy who created the program and gave it to Taku’s parent, he maybe cracked Taku’s parent in the real in the process. And if he did, it’s possible his reach would extend to Taku, who was at the same school and on the same kendo team.”

  “That is a possibility, but it’s already been eight months since that incident. If whoever it was intended to out Takumu in the real, wouldn’t they have made some kind of move a long time ago?” Kuroyukihime’s argument was exceedingly reasonable.

  But Haruyuki slowly shook his head and announced in a trembling voice the only bit of information Kuroyukihime likely didn’t know. “This morning, the reason Pard came to see me was to warn me. She said Supernova Remnant, the worst of the PK groups, might have their sights set on me.”

  “What?!” Kuroyukihime’s eyes flew open, and she stretched out her arms as if to cling to him.

  Haruyuki focused on forcing his frozen mouth to move. “If…if Taku faked sick to skip school and go to Shinjuku…and if those Remnant guys found him and attacked him outside the view of the cameras…” He blinked hard once. “Kuroyukihime, I have to leave school early and go look for Taku! Even if they try to steal his points with a direct duel, it’ll still take a fair bit of time to take them all. If…in the worst case, he has been attacked by a PK, I might still be in time if I go now—”

  “You mustn’t!” She grabbed his shoulders as he stood up, about to shout the “burst out” command. “It’s too dangerous for you to leave school right now!”

  “B-but Taku’s—! If he has Brain Burst force uninstalled, I—I—!”

  “Calm down, Haruyuki! We have to first confirm the situation! He might really simply have caught a cold and be home in bed right now!”

  “But to check that, we have to go outside the school and connect globally…”

  “Don’t worry about it. The fixed terminal here in the student council office can connect to the global net if you make a request. First, we’ll try to get in touch with Takumu using that line. If we can’t connect with him, then…I will go to Shinjuku to look for him. If I bow my head to Knight, he should at least mobilize his subordinates for me.”

  Surprised at these words from her, Haruyuki’s avatar froze.

  The Blue King had been the sworn friend of the first-generation Red King, Red Rider. Haruyuki heard he had been incredibly furious when the Black Lotus took the Red King’s head in a surprise attack. At the Meeting of the Seven Kings the other day, the Blue King had maintained a calm demeanor, but deep down, he had to still be hiding hard-to-control feelings toward Kuroyukihime.

  If she went to him with a request to help a member of her own Legion, Haruyuki very much doubted it would be taken care of by her simply bowing her head. She would definitely be asked to pay a price the help merited. Kuroyukihime was implying that she was prepared even for that.

  Having instantly grasped all this, Haruyuki forced himself to hold strong against the urge to start running recklessly. He absolutely could not lose his cool here. Kuroyukihime’s hand still pressing down on his shoulders, he let out a deep breath and nodded. “I—I understand. First, we’ll try to contact him.”

  “Mmm. All right, then, let’s stop accelerating for the moment.”

  They stood facing each other and shouted, “Burst out,” at the same time. As soon as they returned to their real-world bodies, Kuroyukihime pulled out the direct cable and ran over to the work desk at the back of the student council office. She touched the extremely thin panel monitor there and tapped her fingers lightly along it. Bringing up the rear, Haruyuki stood next to her, and she grabbed at the cable still dangling from his Neurolinker and inserted the connector into a terminal embedded in the desk. When she did, a system message to the effect that Haruyuki was now connected globally scrolled past his eyes.

  “You’re good.”

  He nodded and moved his frozen mouth as fast as he possibly could. “Command, voice call, number zero three.”

  A calling icon immediately started flashing in his field of view
. At the very least, Takumu’s Neurolinker was online. If he was accelerating, though, message mode would answer, so Haru still wouldn’t know whether Taku was being attacked by PKs—or if it was all already over.

  Sweat oozed from the palms of his hands, and he stared intently at the icon. It flashed five, six times…On the seventh time, it picked up.

  “T-Taku?” he said hoarsely, nearly crushed by an enormous sense of dread. Whether he liked it or not, the conversation he had had with Dusk Taker, aka Seiji Nomi, after the other boy lost Brain Burst came back to life in the back of his mind. The first thing he had done was look at Haruyuki—who he had met and spoken with on any number of occasions—with an expression of doubt, as if to say, Who’s this again…? Related memories were erased together with total point loss, and Nomi hadn’t been able to remember Haruyuki right away, given that the majority of their interactions had been through the Accelerated World.

  Of course, Haruyuki and Takumu were childhood friends; they had known each other a long, long time before they both became Burst Linkers. So even if he lost his memories of the Accelerated World, he shouldn’t completely forget who Haruyuki was.

  Haruyuki understood this, but he couldn’t help being afraid. Takumu’s reply came a mere two seconds later, a span of time that felt light years longer.

  “Haru? What’s up?”

  “Oh…um…”

  His friend’s voice, complete with its totally normal, amiable tone, echoed in Haruyuki’s brain. He almost staggered backward, his relief was so great. “I-it’s just, it’s weird for you to miss school. So I was wondering how you were feeling,” he replied awkwardly, putting a hand on the desk.

  “Sorry to make you worry. I’m fine. It’s nothing big.”

  Listening very, very carefully to Takumu, he could actually hear that his friend was not quite his usual lively self. But if he was sick, then that was only natural. Haru got worried about the cold again. “You have a fever? You gotta really rest. No moving around. Are you at home right now?”

  “Ha-ha! Of course I am. I’m not like you, Haru. I took some medicine, and I’m resting like a good boy. I’ll never forget that time when you had the flu ages ago, and you had a fever of thirty-nine degrees, so me and Chii went to see you, and you were pretending to sleep but actually playing a full-dive game.”

  “Well, you should forget that,” Haruyuki replied, and then, just in case, instructed, “Stay away from duels, and just work on getting better. After all, we have an important Legion mission again tomorrow.”

  And there was the slightest pause before Takumu replied, “Yeah, I know. I’ll totally be better by tomorrow. It’s still lunch break, isn’t it? Thank Master for me, too, for letting you use the global connection.”

  The person he referred to as “Master” was, of course, Kuroyukihime, the Legion Master of Nega Nebulus. In other words, this made it certain that he hadn’t lost his memories of the Accelerated World or anything.

  Haruyuki breathed a sigh of relief. “What, you figured it out? Got it. I’ll tell her. Okay, see you tomorrow. Get better soon.”

  Reluctant to make Takumu talk any longer when he could tell his friend was exhausted, Haruyuki cut the connection there. He lifted his face and turned to Kuroyukihime, next to him, with a sheepish smile.

  “Uh, um. It looks like Taku really is resting with a cold. I’m sorry—this is all me jumping to the wrong conclusions.”

  “No need to apologize.” Kuroyukihime shook her head with a warm smile. “I’m just glad it was nothing. But…” Her expression changed slightly, and when Haruyuki handed her the cable he had pulled from his Neurolinker and the desk, she continued as she put it away. “We can’t close our eyes to the fact that those Remnant Linkers might be moving. At the very least, here in Suginami, I don’t think they’ll have such an easy time of finding you or us in the real, but just in case, we should refuse standby duels for a while. And even when it comes to challenging someone, it would be better to refrain with opponents we don’t know very well. After all, it’s not necessarily the case that your real can’t be cracked from the position your avatar appears in.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell Chiyu and Taku.”

  “Please. Well then, shall we have lunch? We should eat in the lounge together from time to time.” She patted him on the shoulder, and Haruyuki nodded, his face softening finally. Kuroyukihime also smiled brightly, and added casually, “We have to thank Blood Leopard for the information as well. In that case, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to meet in the real. You, set that up for us soon.”

  “Okay…o-okay?” After he had already nodded in agreement, he imagined just what the mood would be at such a meeting and threw his whole upper body back with a start. “U-uh, I—I—I don’t know about that?” A shrill tone slipped out as he trailed after Kuroyukihime toward the door.

  While they were having this back-and-forth, Haruyuki could feel that the strange uneasiness still hadn’t completely left him, perhaps because there had been a slight echo of something not normal in Takumu’s voice. If he had a cold and was just feeling sick, then that was only natural. But the weight in that voice, it sounded less like poor physical condition and more like a sort of emotional fluctuation. An instability that somehow made Haru remember Takumu from a certain period the year before.

  It was just his imagination. Takumu was now an unshakable pillar supporting the Legion with his intellect and cool composure.

  Reassuring himself with this thought, Haruyuki wiped the slight sweat coming up from the palms of his hands onto his pants once more and followed Kuroyukihime out of the student council office. Instantly, his apprehensions grew distant at the hustle and bustle of the lunch break that slammed up against him and the smell of spices coming down the hall from the distant cafeteria.

  However…

  A mere three hours later, Haruyuki was made aware of the fact that his apprehensions had been qualitatively correct to a certain extent. But quantitatively, they were wrong. The situation had already reached a point far beyond his or Kuroyukihime’s expectations.

  The one bringing this directly to his attention was the youngest member of the Legion, come to Umesato Junior High to feed Hoo the northern white-faced owl after school: Utai Shinomiya.

  After two afternoon classes, which gave him the chance to nicely digest the curry he’d had for lunch with Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki called, “I’ll mail later,” to Chiyuri on her way to practice and slipped outside. Although up until a week earlier he had raced to escape school and connect his Neurolinker globally so he could devour net information instead of a snack, he couldn’t do that now that he had been officially appointed the president of the Animal Care Club. That said, he was strangely not annoyed by it. In fact, he could even believe he was looking forward to his club work.

  The sky above was cloudy as usual, but fortunately, there was no rain in the forecast again today. He should be able to finally bag up the mountain of leaves he had swept out of the animal hutch and put them in the garbage.

  He went around the second school building and came out in the north yard at its back. Stepping along the mossy ground, he set his sights on the natural wood hutch in the northwest corner. The majority of the yard got no sunlight, but the school building ended and became a low grove of trees to the south of the hutch, allowing sunlight to reach in through the chicken wire.

  There was no sign of anyone else at the hutch that came into view in front of him. The Animal Care Club also consisted of a boy, Hamajima, and a girl, Izeki, in the same grade as he was and selected by drawing lots, but Haruyuki currently had their participation set to voluntary. He had decided that rather than force them to work, it would be better to wait for them to join in of their own volition. He expected to be waiting a fairly long time.

  When he arrived at the hutch, the white-faced owl with the rather cheap name of “Hoo” was taking a bath in the gold tray on the floor. He spread his wings fairly wide and pitched forward, sinking his chest up to his face in the s
hallow layer of water. He soon pulled himself up again, folded in wet wings, and rubbed them in tiny increments. Haruyuki couldn’t stop himself from laughing at this mannerism, so like a person washing their body.

  “Ha-ha! That looks like it feels good.”

  When Haruyuki spoke to him, Hoo whirled his head around and looked at his caretaker, a somehow awkward look coming across his face. He shook his whole body fiercely and sent droplets of water flying before taking off from the water. He carved out several large circles in the hutch and then landed on the left perch, apparently his preferred position, where he promptly began to smooth down the feathers on his chest.

  There was a pressure sensor in that branch that could measure Hoo’s weight. Haruyuki manipulated his virtual desktop to open the club business tab from the local net browser and display the linked sensor value.

  At that moment, a request window for an ad hoc connection popped up in his field of view. Looking to his right, he saw a small girl standing there smiling, clad in a snow-white dress-type uniform, brown backpack on her back.

  “Oh. Hi, Me—I mean, Shinomiya.”

  It was weird, but when he saw her like this in the real world, he always accidentally almost called her by her duel avatar name, and when they were in the Accelerated World, he almost called her by her real name. On the verge of referring to her as “Mei,” short for Ardor Maiden, but catching himself, Haruyuki tapped the YES button with his right hand as he scratched his head with his left.

  The chat tool launched automatically, and Utai began to type on her holokeyboard at her usual speed of ultra. UI> HELLO, ARITA. HOW IS HOO’S WEIGHT, THEN?

  “Oh! Um…It’s within normal range, but a little on the low side?”

  UI> IT IS IMMEDIATELY AFTER HIS LIVING ENVIRONMENT CHANGED, SO THERE’S NO AVOIDING SOME AMOUNT OF STRESS. I BROUGHT A BIT ON THE EXTRA SIDE FOR TODAY’S DINNER. DID YOU WANT TO WATCH THE FEEDING FROM CLOSE UP?

  “Y-yeah, totally!” he replied. Before he closed the browser window, he checked the club tab one more time. The only duty assigned by the system was normal cleaning of the hutch, with one person required. He went through the motions of checking Hamajima’s and Izeki’s names, but as expected, the status shown for both of them was DEPARTED.