Archangel of Savage Light

by Reki Kawahara

  “I’m sure it’ll work out!” Chiyuri’s bright voice broke the moment of silence that fell over them. “That’s why Crow worked so hard to learn Optical Conduction! He’d knock Metatron’s laser right back at the thing easy as pie, I’m sure of it!”

  This is probably where I step in and say something like “Yeah! Leave it to me!” Even with this thought in his mind, what came out of Haruyuki’s mouth was the usual “I’ll do what I can.”

  But Pard slapped him on the shoulder, having come to stand behind him at some point. “’Kay. You can do it.”

  “R-right!”

  Her tone was curt, but the older Burst Linker had always gently encouraged him, so Haruyuki turned to face her, wanting to let her know that he was genuinely committed to the act. But by the time he had taken a deep enough breath, Pard was already walking away. Long tail flicking, she moved on silent feet to the west side of the intersection, facing the towering Castle.

  Haruyuki watched the slender, tough back of the leopard avatar and slowly expelled the air stored in his lungs. Right. This was not the time to get preoccupied with the Metatron fight. They had an objective to achieve before that one, one that required his complete focus:

  The rescue of one of Nega Nebulus’s Four Elements, Aqua Current, sealed away at the east gate of the Castle.

  Haruyuki removed his hands from Fuko’s wheelchair and clenched them into fists. He stood like that as he turned in a slow circle, carving his surroundings into his memory.

  To the north, he could see the Tokyo fire department and the Japan Meteorological Agency, along with the overhead bridge of the expressway ring road.

  To the east, Tokyo Station sat at the end of a broad road. Even in the Century End stage, the redbrick construction was maintained, but the walls were crumbling and scorched in places.

  When he turned to the south, he found Hibiya Park, which they had passed only moments earlier, and the government buildings of Kasumigaseki. Was the thin iron tower soaring far off in the distance the old Tokyo Tower?

  And then: To the west, there was the iron bridge spanning the sheer precipice of the bottomless ravine and the massive gate closed tight on the other side. The gate doors, likely thirty meters tall and wide, were also made of steel, but not a trace of rust or denting could be found on the dark surface. It appeared to be the only thing in the world of the Century End stage—which took post-apocalyptic as its theme—that refused to be corroded at all.

  “The Castle…The east gate,” Haruyuki murmured.

  Moving to his right side, Kuroyukihime nodded softly. “Curren is locked away on the altar in front of that gate. We’ll have a briefing now on the details of the mission, but just like with the south gate, I’ll no doubt be asking you to play a critical role. It’s cowardly of me to consistently rely on you as your parent and as your Legion Master, but I am counting on you, Haruyuki.”

  “That’s— To start with, I’m the one who asked you all to come on this mission today.”

  “No, ever since Curren returned to the Legion, her rescue from the Castle has been an objective we needed to achieve as soon as possible. It’s the same for the Metatron mission. The spread of the ISS kits has come to a point that’s one step away from an epidemic. In fact, I think your insistence was the push I needed when I was hesitating.” Kuroyukihime touched the flat side of the sword that was her left hand to Haruyuki’s shoulder, and then brought her face mask very close.

  “…To be honest,” she murmured, “that fear inside me hasn’t gone away. Will we not see fresh sacrifices against this opponent, the God Seiryu? Will we not confront some unexpected truth at Tokyo Midtown Tower? But at the same time, I also have faith. That no matter what the hardship, your silver wings will slice through it…for us.”

  “…Yes.” He wanted to say so much more, but a hot lump had risen in his throat, and it was all he could do to push out that short answer. Instead, Haruyuki wrapped the fingers of his right hand gently around the tip of Kuroyukihime’s left. He squeezed as hard as he dared—any harder, and he risked having his fingers chopped off by her Terminate Sword—and then managed to add a few more words: “It’s okay. Whatever happens, I’ll protect you. And everyone else.”

  Kuroyukihime’s reply was to nod deeply and then lightly touch her head to Haruyuki’s helmet.

  Just this once, none of the others made an attempt to tease them or comment on the scene. The pair simply leaned against each other as they looked up at the Castle gate.

  After a few seconds, Kuroyukihime stood up once more and turned back to the others behind them. She reached out and opened her Instruct menu, and then after a glance at a window only she could see, her clear voice rang out:

  “It’s been exactly thirty minutes since we entered the Unlimited Neutral Field. In the real world, 1.8 seconds have passed. Aqua Current is scheduled to dive ten seconds after we did, which works out to two hours and forty-six minutes on this side. In other words, we have two hours and sixteen minutes left to wait. First, we’ll take a fifteen-minute break before we start the mission brief.”

  “Wellll then, I’ll just go poke around Tokyo Station—,” Niko started.

  “No!” Kuroyukihime barked instantly, frighteningly. “There’s a portal there, and Aurora Oval territory is on the other side of the tracks. Worst-case scenario, if you run into Thorn’s people, the situation will instantly become a major hassle.”

  “Aah. Yeah, I guess so.” Niko nodded meekly. Apparently, even she wasn’t too interested in actively engaging the Purple King, Purple Thorn. “Nothing to be done about that. So how ’bout you show me around the Castle, Professor?”

  “Wh-what?! Why me?!” Takumu immediately panicked, like someone had just dumped a bucket of cold water on him.

  “You didn’t actually forget, didja?” Niko stared at him with her green eye lenses. “How I was there for all that Incarnate training of yours? I’ll say this right now—I’ve never even done that kinda special lesson for my own Prominence kids!”

  “I—I didn’t forget! Of course not! But how can I show you around when we can’t go inside…?”

  “Just what we can see from here’s fine. The east gate there, it has a different name with some kinda historical trivia in the real world, yeah?” Niko pointed an adorable hand at the steel gate, and Takumu and the others followed with their eyes.

  Now that she mentioned it, the four gates of the Castle did correspond to the gates built to the north, east, south, and west of the former Edo Castle—the Imperial Palace in the real world. And just like the Hanzomon gate in the west and the Sakuradamon gate in the south, the east must also have had a name.

  “Um.” When all eyes were back on Takumu, the blue duel avatar that served as the Legion’s staff officer cleared his throat once before explaining, slightly awkwardly, “The Castle’s east gate is called Sakashitamon in the real world. It was one of the inner gates of Edo Castle, and where, in January 1862, six Mito Domain soldiers attacked the roju elder Nobumasa Ando.”

  Haruyuki’s brain was about to reject the sudden school vibe in the air and tune out, but at the same time, Takumu’s speech jogged a part of his memory, and he twisted his upper body at a strange angle and groaned.

  “Um, um, um. I feel like I’ve heard that before…You know, that— Right, the Sakashitamon Incident!” he shouted, having miraculously succeeded in replaying the memory.

  “Anyone would remember that when they heard Sakashitamon.” Chiyuri immediately came back with a merciless retort. “So then, question! What was the reason for the attack?”

  “Uh! Um, that was, like, they couldn’t stand the roju Ando, so a PK—”

  “Details, please! The reason they couldn’t stand him?”

  “Uhhhh. Um. Pretty sure…” Haruyuki hadn’t been expecting a test on Japanese history here, and he did his best to pull up what little half-baked knowledge he had. “That’s— Ando signed a treaty with the US and totally persecuted the imperialists who were against it—”

&nbs
p; “Bzzzzt!” Chiyuri made an “incorrect” buzzer noise.

  “So close, Corvus.” Fuko turned toward Haruyuki, wheelchair and all, holding up her index finger and grinning. “It was the tairo elder Ii Naosuke who carried out the Ansei Purge. Incidentally, he was also attacked by the Mito Domain soldiers, but that was at the south gate over there, the so-called Sakuradamon Incident. That happened in 1860, so two years before the Sakashitamon Incident.”

  “Oh! I-it did…So then why was Ando attacked?”

  “To strengthen the shaky feudal system, Nobumasa Ando recommended uniting the Imperial court with the shogunate. As a symbol of this, he had the younger sister of Emperor Komei, Kazunomiya, married off to the fourteenth shogun, Iemochi Tokugawa. They say that this was what made the lordless, imperialist Mito samurai attack.”

  The cache memory in Haruyuki’s brain had just barely enough capacity for this string of proper nouns, but he managed to process it somehow and bobbed his head up and down. “I—I get it. There were six samurai who attacked, right? And the defense—I mean, the samurai guarding Ando, how many of them were there?”

  Takumu cleared his throat before answering. “I guess forty-five samurai from the Iwakitaira domain were guarding him. Iwakitaira was Nobumasa’s territory in what’s now the southern part of Fukushima prefecture.”

  Haruyuki automatically converted this explanation into forty-five members of the Legion Iwakitaira, but he kept that to himself, and instead crossed his arms and groaned. “Whoa, six against forty-five, huh? So what’s happening in the boss figh—I mean, attack?”

  “The Mito samurai were all cut down and killed; there were no deaths among the Iwakitaira samurai. Nobumasa Ando’s back was hurt, but he escaped into the Castle and was safe.”

  “Hmm. He was…” Of course, Haruyuki didn’t know enough to root for one side or the other when it came to samurai who had crossed swords in that place in the real world a hundred eighty-five years earlier. But listening to Takumu, he couldn’t help conflating the two. The eight Burst Linkers taking on a powerful Super-class Enemy and the six samurai who were cut down in the distant past.

  “Aah, honestly, why are you so easy to read, Haru?” Chiyuri sounded suddenly exasperated, and Haruyuki flinched. The yellow-green witch-type avatar was shaking her triangle hat in a way that suggested she was rolling her eyes.

  “Wh-what do you mean, easy to read?”

  “We’re also going to be struck down and killed. You were brooding or something like that, weren’t you?”

  “Unh!”

  “Now, look, this is totally different! We didn’t come to assassinate a roju; we came to help Curren! And you were fine when you got shoved into the Castle, so don’t go getting freaked out now in front of the gate!”

  He did feel her logic was a little forced, but when his childhood friend rattled on at him with her usual vigor, Haruyuki inevitably agreed with an “I get it.” Nodding deeply, he clenched his right hand. “Right, no matter how you look at it, we’re in the right this time! If we could somehow defeat Seiryu with justice power, then our points would—”

  “Don’t get carried away!”

  Thmp! The edge of Choir Chime was jabbed into his side, and Haruyuki fell silent, leaving the others to sigh in unison.

  “Now that preparations for the upcoming final exams are complete, how about we get to the strategy meeting?” Kuroyukihime said as if to change the subject, clearing her throat lightly and moving to the mouth of the bridge. “You’re ready, yes?”

  The voices that chimed their assent were a little lackluster, and Haruyuki was convinced it was because of the words in the Black King’s speech that every student had long ago learned to dread.

  The waiting time of two hours and fifteen minutes, which had seemed ridiculously long when announced, slipped by in the blink of an eye with a thorough briefing and a run-through of the mission.

  Kuroyukihime checked the total dive time display on her Instruct menu once more before turning around. “All right. Fifteen minutes until the mission begins. Curren should be fairly precise with the timing, but an error of 0.1 seconds in the real world expands to a hundred seconds over here. Which is to say, we need to add a window of two minutes or so to our calculations.”

  In the mission to rescue Ardor Maiden twelve days earlier, once they had finished their preparations on the Unlimited Neutral Field side, Takumu had left through the nearest portal and told Utai in the real world to accelerate.

  But this time, they had fixed Aqua Current’s—Akira Himi’s—dive time in advance. So if, for some reason, the advance party’s charge onto the steel bridge had been delayed, Akira would have been killed by the God Seiryu immediately after she appeared. Fortunately, thanks to Niko’s “taxi,” they had arrived at the east gate without incident and completed their preparations without delay, but now, the real fight started. Haruyuki focused his mind so as not to miss a single thing Kuroyukihime said.

  “The last time, after going up against Suzaku twice, we learned that the Gods have apparently been given an AI more advanced than Legend-class Enemies. It’s not necessarily the case that they continually target whoever is doing them the most damage, and they also move as if to deliberately outwit us. We might be put into a situation that we didn’t cover in our simulation. In that case, all we can do is play it by ear, but make sure you place top priority on your own withdrawal. We must at least avoid anyone else getting sealed away.”

  The Black King’s voice was calm, but Haruyuki noticed a faint hint of struggle in her last sentence.

  When Kuroyukihime and Fuko had nearly been roasted alive in the previous Castle rescue mission, they had tried to sacrifice themselves to save Haruyuki and Utai. That act was a clear contradiction to what she was saying now. Most likely, Kuroyukihime had again already resolved in her heart that she alone would prioritize the withdrawal of her companions.

  But he was sure it was the same for Fuko and Utai and Takumu and Chiyuri and Niko and Pard. It was precisely because they all shared the conviction that they absolutely could not abandon a friend that they were gathered together there in the first place. That feeling was a Burst Linker’s greatest strength.

  “Yeah, yeah, got it, Lotus!” Scarlet Rain said, sitting on an oil drum instead of a chair and kicking both legs up and down. “Basic idea, we go charging in, all raaah, get Aqua Current, and then we all run away, like whoa, right? It’s only five hundred meters each way. Piece of cake!”

  “You say only, Rain, but when you’re running, five hundred meters is really far. The return trip is a kilometer.”

  “So what’s a kilometer! I mean, at my school marathon, the grade sixes ran three kilometers! Aah, seriously, I’m getting tired just thinking about it.”

  “Don’t underestimate us! Our school’s marathon is five kilometers! That’s a distance the word tired doesn’t begin to express!” The kings’ exchange was sliding further and further off track.

  “Niko, Kuroyukihime,” Chiyuri interjected, exasperated. “I run that far-ish every day at practice.”

  “…Are you serious? You trying to die, Lime Bell?”

  “…I apologize for the low-level argument.” Kuroyukihime dipped her head and then straightened up to look at everyone, easing the slightly tense pre-mission atmosphere, albeit only slightly. She slowly blinked her bluish-purple eye lenses, then spoke in a voice that was calm yet full of her strong will.

  “Just as Rain said, the mission itself is simple. I believe it’s possible to break through Seiryu’s powerful attack with this battle formation. Ten minutes to show time. Let’s take our starting positions.”

  2

  What was the true nature of an Enhanced Armament?

  Posed with this question, the majority of low-level Burst Linkers would likely respond that they were an enhancement of attack power. And that was certainly not wrong; gun- and sword-type Enhanced Armaments dramatically increased the attack power of a duel avatar and expanded the range of battle tactics.

&nbs
p; But for Burst Linkers who had reached midlevel or higher, who had built up experience through wins and losses in countless duels in the Accelerated World, the true advantages of Enhanced Armaments were seen in defense.

  And this was because a defensive Enhanced Armament was not a mere enhancement of defensive ability. In fact, there was one very simple factor that made this so, but because of that simplicity, it was not so easy to recognize:

  While an Enhanced Armament was taking the enemy’s attacks, the health gauge of the user did not decrease.

  To look at it another way, this was equivalent to doubling or tripling the health gauge. In the Accelerated World, where, as a general rule, the means to recover health did not exist, hit points were not particularly remarkable, but they were the most important parameter.

  Of course, that said, just because someone had strong additional armor didn’t necessarily make them the strongest. Armor-type Enhanced Armaments were heavy and interfered with movement, so without mastery of it, its use only made that person a target. They needed either the power to be able to move lightly while wrapped in armor or the firepower to shoot and win even when motionless.

  The ultimate example of the former was the armor that had introduced Haruyuki to overwhelming battle power, the Armor of Catastrophe, aka Chrome Disaster. And the ultimate example of the latter was the Immobile Fortress, Scarlet Rain.

  “Here we…gooooooooo!!”

  The Red King’s roar, replete with her indomitable spirit, fired the first shot of the mission to rescue Aqua Current, which finally started at 12:20:10 PM, June 30, 2047, real-world time.

  The twelve wheels of the re-summoned Enhanced Armament, the armored Dreadnought, spun fiercely, leaving burn marks on the road of the Century End stage. The treads of the tires finally bit into the pavement, and the massive vehicle lurched forward, tearing up the asphalt as it went.

  For their starting point, they’d decided on a place about three hundred meters from the entrance to the bridge in front of the east gate of the Castle. They’d cleared away the oil drums and chunks of concrete beforehand, so there were no objects to get in the way of driving. Moving forward in a straight line, the massive crimson carriage picked up speed along the improvised long jump track.