Armor of Catastrophe

by Reki Kawahara

  Swallowing a sigh, Haruyuki watched as Utai unlocked the large electronic lock. Her small hand beckoned him over. They opened the chicken wire door the barest minimum and hurried inside.

  After she shut the door and slid the inside lock closed, Utai took off her backpack. She first pulled out a light-brown leather gauntlet—no, glove. When she put it on, it covered her left arm up to her elbow. She reached into her bag once more, this time taking out a small cooler. She popped it open with her left hand, and he saw what appeared to be thin strips of raw meat inside.

  Whoa, total bird-of-prey stuff.

  As Haruyuki watched, impressed, Utai stood and held her left hand up toward the perch. Hoo spread his wings, like he had some kind of telepathic connection with her, and flapped them to move to her hand. Reddish-gold eyes open in perfect circles, he pushed his beak forward, practically telling her to hurry up.

  Utai went to lean down to the cooler on the floor, so Haruyuki hurriedly lifted it up and held it in both arms. Utai smiled and plucked a strip of the dark-red meat from the cooler.

  When she brought it near Hoo’s face, he quickly pecked at it with his sharp beak and ate it, basically swallowing it whole. It was utterly unlike pigeons or chickens pecking at food on the ground. Haruyuki was once more impressed, while Utai offered pieces of meat one after another to be promptly dispatched to Hoo’s stomach. Although he wondered what kind of meat it was; having never cooked in his life really, Haruyuki couldn’t tell just by looking.

  In no time at all, the cooler, which looked like it held a lot in comparison with the owl’s twenty-centimeter body, was empty. Utai stroked his face as if to say, That’s all, and Hoo moved his head around, looking satisfied, before flying up to return to his original branch.

  After Utai took off the glove and accepted the cooler from Haruyuki, she went outside the hutch and began to wash up with the tap attached to the hutch. While she did, Haruyuki changed the synthetic paper spread out around the perch. In the era when the daily news had been delivered on paper media, they had apparently used the stuff, known as newspaper, for this purpose and then thrown it away, but natural-fiber paper was now an expensive luxury item. He took turns with Utai, using running water to wash off the paper mats dirtied with Hoo’s droppings and then hanging them on the small hanger on the side of the hutch.

  Once the job was finished, Haruyuki asked the question he had been dying to for a while now. “Hey, Shinomiya? What kind of meat was it you gave Hoo there?”

  The fourth grader smiled and her hands flashed. UI> PLEASE TRY TO GUESS.

  “Huh? Umm, chicken?”

  Utai pushed at a spot in the air with her fingertip; Bzzt!—the sound of a wrong buzzer echoed in his hearing, the chat tool’s sound function at work.

  “O-okay, then, pork?”

  Bzzt!

  “What? It can’t be beef?”

  Bzzt!

  “L-lamb?”

  Bzzt!

  “It can’t be fish?”

  Bzzt!

  Here, Haruyuki threw up his hands in surrender.

  Utai tapped out unexpected words, smiling somehow meaningfully as she did. UI> WELL THEN, TOMORROW I WILL SHOW YOU FROM THE POINT OF DRESSING IT. A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF MENTAL DAMAGE CAN BE EXPECTED, SO PLEASE PREPARE YOURSELF.

  “Uh…dress?”

  UI> NOW THEN, BEFORE IT GETS TOO LATE, SHALL WE TAKE CARE OF THESE LEAVES? THEY APPEAR TO BE COMPLETELY DRIED. She grinned at him once more, and unable to pursue the matter further, he nodded.

  “Y-yeah. I’ll go get some garbage bags.” He began to trot off toward the toolshed in the courtyard as he glanced at the inside of the hutch; the owl, belly full, had his eyes closed, seemingly asleep in his usual pose: ear coverts down, standing on one leg.

  The work to stuff the old leaves piled up in the yard into semitransparent garbage bags, the design of which had not changed in who knew how many years, took nearly thirty minutes. If they could have built an enormous bonfire and roasted sweet potatoes and things over it—he had seen scenes like this in old movies and manga—then it might have been a fun and delicious process, but if a fire was set on school grounds, an alarm would sound, fleets of emergency vehicles would swarm the place, and with no exaggeration, the fire starter would be arrested by the police. But even before that, it was next to impossible for anyone underage to get ahold of any kind of fire-starting device like a lighter. The gang that had bullied Haruyuki so mercilessly the year before apparently never managed the Eternal Legend–level act of delinquency of smoking on school grounds.

  Thus, they had to drag the eight bags they had worked hard to cram full of leaves over to the collection area in a corner of the front yard. When this task was complete, the time was 4:20 PM.

  “Phew. Finally cleaned all that up, huh…”

  UI> THANK YOU FOR YOUR HARD WORK.

  They looked at each other and smiled before washing their hands in turn. And with that, the day’s duties were complete. He had promised to go visit Takumu with Chiyuri, but her practice usually ended around five, so he had a little time.

  Just as he was wondering what he should do, Utai, having finished neatly drying her hands with a snow-white handkerchief, cocked her head lightly to one side and clicked on space. Manipulating a window with her right hand, she tapped deftly at her keyboard with just her left. UI> IT’S A MAIL FROM FU. IT’S TAGGED AS URGENT, SO I APOLOGIZE, BUT I’LL JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO READ IT.

  The “Fu” Utai spoke of was Fuko Kurasaki, aka Sky Raker. He asked himself why she would be able to get an e-mail from Fuko, who attended a high school in Shibuya Ward, while on school grounds, before quickly answering his own question. When Haruyuki’s Neurolinker was connected to the Umesato local net, he was automatically disconnected from the global net, but Utai was treated as a guest user of the Umesato net, so that restriction didn’t apply. And because she used a brain implant chip for normal networking, even if she left her connection to the global net open, she wouldn’t be registered on the Brain Burst matching list.

  “S-sure, go ahead.” Haruyuki nodded, and Utai quickly opened the mail and ran her eyes over it.

  Instantly, her large eyes, irises tinged with a faint red, opened as wide as they could. Her lips sucked in air as if gasping and trembled lightly.

  “Huh? Wh-what’s wrong?!” Stunned, Haruyuki took a step toward her.

  The girl shifted the focus of her eyes from her virtual desktop to Haruyuki and tapped at her keyboard with fingers that were the slightest bit clumsy. UI> ARITA, DO YOU KNOW ABOUT SUPERNOVA REMNANT, JUDGED TO BE THE WORST OF THE PK GROUPS?

  “……!!” He did know them. To be more precise, it was only that morning he had learned of them, but in the eight hours since, that name had been burned into Haruyuki’s brain together with an overwhelming terror. “Y-yeah…what about them?” he asked in a hoarse voice, a very bad feeling crawling up his spine.

  UI> THIS MORNING, FOUR HIGH-LEVEL BURST LINKERS ASSUMED TO BE MEMBERS OF THIS REMNANT ATTACKED A LONE BURST LINKER IN THE UNLIMITED NEUTRAL FIELD IN SHINJUKU WARD—

  Haruyuki screwed up his face and stared at the cherry-colored font scrolling across the window. It can’t be. No way. The thought chased out all others as it whirled around in his brain. It’s not Taku. I mean, Taku answered when I called at lunch and everything. And he totally remembered me and Kuroyukihime, didn’t he?

  However, the several characters displayed in his field of view in the next instant gave an even more enormous shock, throwing him deeper into confusion.

  UI> —AND APPARENTLY, THEY INSTEAD WERE COMPLETELY DESTROYED.

  “Huh? D-destroyed?” Haruyuki parroted, dumbfounded, unable to grasp her meaning immediately. “Destroyed…So the worst PK Remnant was…done in by one person…?”

  UI> IT APPEARS THAT WAY. AT THE TIME, THERE WAS A LEGION CAMPING OUT NEARBY ON A LONG-TERM ENEMY HUNT. THE BATTLE EFFECTS WERE SO VIOLENT THAT THEY NOTICED THE FIGHT AND WENT TO INVESTIGATE. WHILE THEY WATCHED, THE FOUR, WHO WERE ASSUMED TO HAVE BEEN THE
SIDE TO ATTACK FIRST, WERE KNOCKED DOWN ONE AFTER ANOTHER, AND WHEN THEY DIED, IT WAS APPARENTLY A FINAL DISAPPEARANCE. IN OTHER WORDS, THE FOUR BURST LINKERS AND THE LONE BURST LINKER ARE THOUGHT TO HAVE WAGERED ALL THEIR POINTS ON A SUDDEN DEATH DUEL CARD.

  “Uh, um. So is it like this? The four members of Remnant attacked someone in the real, threatened them to get them to agree to Sudden Death. But that someone fought back and brought them all to total point loss in one go?”

  UI> THAT WAS THE HYPOTHESIS FU ALSO NOTED.

  “Wh-who on earth could turn things around like that? One of the kings? A king used themselves as bait to call out Remnant and finish them off?” That was as far as Haruyuki could manage to guess.

  But Utai, face still frozen, shook her head slowly from side to side and tapped at the air with even more awkward fingers. UI> NO. THIS LONE PERSON THE E NEMY-HUNTING LEGION SAW WAS A HEAVYWEIGHT CLASS WITH LIGHT-BLUE ARMOR, EQUIPPED WITH AN ENHANCED ARMAMENT WITH PIERCING CHARACTERISTICS ON THE RIGHT HAND. HE CARRIED THE LAST MEMBER OF THE GROUP HE WAS FIGHTING, SPEARED BY THE STAKE IN HIS RIGHT HAND, OVER TO THE WITNESSES AND ANNOUNCED THAT THIS BURST LINKER WAS A MEMBER OF SUPERNOVA REMNANT BEFORE STRIKING THE KILLING BLOW AND LEAVING THROUGH A PORTAL. FU SAYS IT MIGHT BE

  After a moment’s hesitation, she continued, and the final words scrolled slowly before Haruyuki’s eyes.

  UI> CYAN PILE.

  8

  Haruyuki ran.

  He went out the school gates and turned east on Oume Kaido, directly to the north. He often kept going in this direction on his way home from school, all the way up to Kannana Street, but right now at least, time was his top priority, and he went back the opposite way along the road to school that cut diagonally through a residential area.

  Since the shortest route between Umesato Junior High and his own condo was approximately 1.5 kilometers, running the whole way nonstop was quite the trial for Haruyuki. However, just this once, he felt practically none of the pain of the torture of being made to run long distances in gym class. A fathomless impatience spurring him on, he pulled air into his lungs one breath after another and kicked at the pavement.

  A few seconds after he had been made aware of the content of the urgent mail Fuko Kurasaki had sent to Utai Shinomiya, Haruyuki had gone into action. First, he submitted the Animal Care Club daily log to the in-school net and sent a mail to Chiyuri Kurashima, who was still at practice, saying, “I’m going to head over to see Takumu now.” Then he asked Utai to tell Kuroyukihime in the student council office what she had just told him, and he himself had flown out the school gates.

  “…Taku…why…what…” Between gasps for air, broken words slipped out of his throat. The sweat pouring down from his forehead got in his eyes, and he wiped it away with clenched hands.

  The information communicated by Fuko itself was not critical. Because Takumu—Cyan Pile—had won the fight of one against many and safely left the field. This was clear also from the fact that he had actually answered the call Haruyuki made to him over lunch.

  But there was a “something” that happened before this situation arose. He had no doubt about that. Supposedly home in bed with a cold, Takumu had crossed swords with a PK group in Shinjuku, an already abnormal situation. And there was one other mystery that he didn’t want to think about but couldn’t ignore, either.

  How did he win?

  Cyan Pile was currently at level five, just like Silver Crow. While he couldn’t be called a newbie, he wasn’t exactly a veteran, either. In contrast, the members of Remnant all had to be level six at least, given that they were described as “high level.” A perfect victory taking on four such Enemies at the same time—and in the Unlimited Neutral Field, where anything could happen—would have been absolutely impossible, for Haruyuki at least.

  Of course, he could definitely vouch for Takumu’s physical attack abilities, and he simply could not compete with his friend’s cool or his resourcefulness. Still, slaughtering four Burst Linkers at a higher level than he was and all at the same time was not normal. After all, Kuroyukihime herself had said that she had once fought five kings, all the same level as she was, and had not been able to bring down even one of them.

  “Something.” An abnormal “something” that Haruyuki couldn’t begin to imagine was distorting the rules of the game. And he was sure it was still around. Takumu’s voice during the call at lunch had held the faintest hint of a hollowness. That was probably not because he had a fever.

  “…Taku…”

  When he turned left onto Kannana from the path along the elevated Chuo Line, the familiar figure of his destination appeared, the multiuse skyscraper condo.

  Best friends. Not that bond. That at least should still not be lost. At the same time as he sent up this fervent prayer, Haruyuki also understood, whether he wanted to or not, that the fact that he’d run so desperately all the way here was proof that he had unconsciously felt that at that moment, even that bond was rocked, unstable.

  The condo that Haruyuki, Chiyuri, and Takumu lived in was a combined facility, with a large shopping mall taking up the space from the basement to the third floor. Although the mall, which housed all kinds of shops handling groceries and daily necessities, clothing, and electronics, and even a cinema complex—albeit a midsized one—increased the added value of the condos, naturally, it wasn’t only residents who came to shop there. Thus, a strict security gate stood in the area that was the boundary between mall and condo. If even residents, much less visitors, were not recognized by the biometrics in their Neurolinkers, they could not pass.

  At the gate before the elevator hall, Haruyuki waited impatiently for the few seconds it took for the indicator displayed in his field of view to change to green. The instant the metal bar bounced up, he dashed through and blocked an elevator door that was about to close with his body before jumping inside. A housewife who apparently lived there frowned, but he simply bowed lightly and turned to face forward.

  Haruyuki’s apartment was on the twenty-third floor of the eastern B wing, and Chiyuri’s was on the twenty-first floor of the same B wing, but Takumu lived on the nineteenth floor of the A wing, built separately to the west. Haruyuki naturally got into the A-wing elevator, and as he listened to the somehow slightly different sound of the motor, he stared at the ever-increasing floor display, willing it to go faster.

  When he was little, no sooner had he set down his backpack after coming home from school every day than he was flying out of the house to play until dark in the amusement area of the mall or at a park nearby. When they went home, stomachs rumbling with hunger, the three of them would wave at one another on the first floor of the mall, and Haruyuki and Chiyuri would head toward the B-wing elevator hall on the right, while Takumu went over to the A-wing hall to the left. If he had turned around in front of the security gate, Takumu’s eyes would have seen the backs of Haruyuki and Chiyuri running for the elevator.

  What had he felt then?

  What if whatever it was that had been building up in his heart over the years had made him decide to confess his crush on Chiyuri just a little early, when he was still in fifth grade?

  It was in the evening of a cold, cold day, when the first snow fell, a little slushy.

  Naturally, their usual outdoor fun had been called off, and Haruyuki was playing video games by himself at home. The doorbell rang, his full dive was automatically canceled, and when he sullenly opened the door, Chiyuri was on the other side of it. Cocking his head to one side at his childhood friend, who didn’t look like her usual self, Haruyuki showed her to his room. She sat down on the bed, and then after a brief silence, she announced it finally in a thin voice.

  That Takumu had told her he liked her. And that she didn’t know what to do about it.

  There was no way that eleven-year-old Haruyuki could know, either. As he stared at the dumbfounded Chiyuri’s profile, listening with equal parts surprise and confusion, he was intuitively certain of one thing at least. If Chiyuri turned Takumu down, he w
ould pull away. They would lose their time together after school, so filled with golden light, and they’d never get it back.

  When Chiyuri asked him what he thought she should do, a helpless look on her face, Haruyuki replied, half reflexively, “You and Taku’d go good together. And I won’t stop being your friend even if you guys start dating.”

  Chiyuri hung her head deeply and wiped at the corner of her eye with her hand before lifting her face and smiling with a “Right, got it.”

  In the end, however, Haruyuki’s words turned out to be a lie. He distanced himself little by little from the new couple, Chiyuri and Takumu, and by summer vacation of sixth grade, the three of them almost never hung out together anymore.

  When they were moving up to junior high, Takumu apparently recommended that Chiyuri take the test for the same school in Shinjuku as he had. But she had made her decision long ago and chose Umesato Junior High, which was so close to home.

  She was probably trying to at least maintain the circular shape of the ring the three of them made, which was starting to break. However, this declaration of intent chased Takumu further away. He tried to get the power to secure his connection with Chiyuri through Brain Burst, given to him by the captain of his kendo team. Although he had managed the brilliant accomplishments of the top grades in his year and winning the municipal kendo tournament through the power of acceleration, the burst points he needed to maintain this status dried up, and he succumbed to the temptation of a forbidden cheat tool, the backdoor program.

  Once he set up the program in Chiyuri’s Neurolinker by directing with her, he used her as a stepping-stone to infiltrate the Umesato local net, found the name Black Lotus there, the Burst Linker with the largest bounty in the Accelerated World, and tried to hunt her. And then…