Archangel of Savage Light

by Reki Kawahara

  But of course, this information hadn’t been obtained from the outside. The Black King was the in-game scion and actual younger sister of the White King, White Cosmos. The reason Kuroyukihime knew the White Legion’s base was because she was a relative who had once lived with her under the same roof.

  Kuroyukihime herself had informed Haruyuki of this after school three days earlier in the student council office of Umesato Junior High. The only other people there who likely knew were the three Elements, but given how sharp her natural intuition was, Chiyuri had probably figured out that there was some kind of relationship between Kuroyukihime and the White King. Haruyuki was sure Kuroyukihime would talk to her and Takumu in the not-so-distant future about everything, about the series of events leading up to her split from her “parent,” the White King.

  Whether she was aware of Haruyuki’s thoughts or not, Kuroyukihime nodded slowly and brought the discussion to a close. “Now, at any rate, we appear to have no opposing opinions, so we’ll all fill our special-attack gauges, just in case, and then head first toward the old Tokyo Tower on a southward course. If the Red King aaaaaaabsolutely insists she does not want to drive, we will have no choice but to walk the twenty kilometers.”

  “Ugh! Honestly! Fine, I get it!” Niko cried, waving her right hand around. But then, with a grin, she countered, “But sneaking around on these back roads is a total hassle. We’re taking the main streets! We run into any big Enemies and I’m charging right through ’em. You fall off, you get back up on the roof on your own!”

  Despite this wild call, Niko’s driving was actually quite restrained, compared with their earlier trip. The armored truck, like new after being refreshed in the second dive, rolled down Oume Highway at a speed of forty kilometers per hour and took a right at Nakano-sakaue Station. Once they got onto Yamate Street, the sixth of the eight roads encircling the city center, she sped up only slightly.

  Just as the Shinjuku Government Building rising up to their immediate left indicated, this area was smack in the middle of Blue Legion territory, but fortunately, there was no sign of any Enemy hunting parties. To start with, even if they set up a long-term camp for a continuous month, that was only about forty-five minutes in the real world. Unexpected encounters with other Burst Linkers were relatively rare.

  If there were no hunts going on, then it stood to reason that the possibility of encountering an Enemy would increase, but even when they passed through the center of Shinjuku, Yamate Street was blanketed in silence. The Twilight stage wasn’t the best for their current mission, but the excellent visibility that came from all the buildings transformed into ruins was a blessing.

  Kuroyukihime, Akira, Utai, Pard, and Chiyuri were merrily chatting away in the center of the roof, but having volunteered to keep watch, Haruyuki alone was sitting at the very front of the vehicle with watchful eyes. They passed through Shinjuku, and a large grassy field came into view up ahead on the left. The temple standing alone in the center with little in the way of ruins damage had to have been Meiji Shrine. Which meant that on the other side was the Shibuya area.

  “Corvus, it seems like you don’t often go to Shibuya. Is there a reason for that, I wonder?” The question came abruptly from behind him.

  Haruyuki jumped and looked over his shoulder. His eyes landed on Fuko’s gentle smile as she sat in her wheelchair, having taken his back at some point. “Um, oh, nothing in particular. It’s not like that, but…” Shrinking into himself, he mumbled, “It’s like, Shibuya and Harajuku, I mean, there’s this image, like you go buy clothes and stuff there or, um, like you go on d-dates…I guess I just never…had the need to go, you know…”

  Fuko blinked and then smiled broadly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t clear. I mean to ask why you don’t go duel there.”

  “Heh…”

  He felt like Niko in the cockpit below was holding in a laugh, but Haruyuki didn’t have the mental wiggle room to respond to that. He waved his hands wildly in front of his face.

  “R-right! Please forget what I said! Um, the reason I don’t duel in the Shibuya area…B-basically, I don’t really go there in the real, so I don’t know the lay of the land too well. And I kinda figured that if I rubbed the Green Legion, GW, the wrong way and they came at us for real in the Territories, we’d be in trouble.”

  “You needn’t worry about that second reason. GW’s Six Armors aren’t the type of people to get revenge for normal duels in the Territories. Probably…But the only thing to be done about your first reason is resolve it with experience.”

  “E-experience…What do you…?”

  “Once this mission is over, I’ll show you around Shibuya. There are a lot of shops I could show you that I think you’d like, Corvus?”

  “Sh-shops? Not like…an Accelerated World shop, but…”

  “Real-world arcades, used bookstores, things like that. Of course, I don’t care at all if you’d prefer to go buy ‘clothes and things.’”

  “Th—”

  That’s basically a da— The moment this flashed through his mind, he heard a voice from below once more, and it didn’t come via the speaker.

  “Hey, gimme a break already. Don’t go making dates right on top of someone’s head here!”

  “D—” He was about to shout, It’s not a date—it’s training! when it suddenly occurred to him. Naturally, he wasn’t averse to being alone with Fuko, but if they were going to take a field trip to Shibuya, a big group would definitely be more fun.

  He took a deep breath before somehow regaining his calm and turning around. “I understand, Master. So on our next free day, we’ll all go to Shibuya. With Niko and Pard and Kuroyukihime and Takumu and everyone…And of course, Rin, too.”

  “Yes, let’s do that.” Fuko kindly narrowed her madder-red eye lenses and nodded slowly twice. “Those green kids will get quite the surprise, hmm?”

  “H-hey! I wasn’t saying you gotta drag me along or something, you know!” Niko shouted as if flustered, then added, “I’m not saying I won’t go, though.”

  Haruyuki and Fuko laughed out loud together.

  Even after they passed through Shibuya and entered Meguro, the road was quiet. Engine gently rumbling, the armored vehicle moved forward along the dusky main highway, ruined temples lining both sides. Ebisu, Meguro, Gotanda—Haruyuki had absolutely no opportunity to visit the south side of the city center in either the real or Accelerated World, so he gradually lost track of where they were at any given moment. The massive setting sun off to the right had shifted at some point to directly behind them, and with that, he finally realized that their direction had changed from south to east.

  Great Wall, which controlled the three areas of Shibuya, Meguro, and Shinagawa, was without a doubt the largest organization in the Accelerated World in terms of both territory size and number of members. But their policies were the most moderate of the six Legions that had signed the mutual nonaggression pact, and they very rarely went on group trips to even the neutral areas. Although they sent an attack team to Nega Nebulus’s territory during the Territories every weekend, the group was usually made up of level twos and threes, up to five at the highest—which gave Haruyuki the impression that GW was trying to give their younger members experience rather than take Negabu’s territory.

  The Green Legion poured the majority of their strength into hunting large Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Accordingly, the Green King, Green Grandé, was powerful enough to be able to safely hunt Wild-class solo, and he earned a massive quantity of burst points on his frequent long-term hunting trips.

  What was different about Grandé was that he turned all those hard-won points into card items and then fed them to the weakest Lesser-class Enemies. And he didn’t limit this feeding to Shibuya and Meguro, so parties from other Legions could also hunt these so-called bonus Enemies to win large numbers of points. This was actually more often the case than not.

  In other words, the Green King was redistributing the points obtained from Enemies arou
nd the Unlimited Neutral Field, with the point of this work being the continuation and expansion of the Accelerated World, of the fighting game Brain Burst 2039. When Haruyuki met him by chance on the roof of the Roppongi Hills Tower, Grandé explained his reasons using unfamiliar terms.

  Trial number one aka Accel Assault 2038.

  Trial number three aka Cosmos Corrupt 2040.

  They had both been abandoned due to the exit of all the players. But Brain Burst 2039, trial number two, was equipped with some elements that the other two did not have. Until it became clear what these were, the world could not be permitted to be closed.

  While all of this was utterly incomprehensible to Haruyuki, it was also terrifying at the same time. Especially the word trial. If it was the trial of “a series of trials and errors,” then didn’t that mean this world that had saved Haruyuki, guided him, and given him so much was nothing more than a fleeting fiction to be extinguished on a whim? So Haruyuki had so far not taken the time to think too deeply about the Green King’s words.

  It wasn’t that he blindly feared the destruction of the Accelerated World. As long as the master of swords, Kuroyukihime, the person he loved and respected more than anyone, achieved her dream of reaching level ten and as a result, cleared the game, he thought he might like to watch the end of the world by her side. He felt like, in that case, he would be able to get something just as big and important, even if the Accelerated World vanished.

  But the idea of some unknown entity deciding it was a failure and flicking a switch to make everything disappear—all of it reduced to zero with them only halfway through, taking along for the ride the memories of each and every Burst Linker—he absolutely hated this possibility. But at the same time, he was at a level where he could do nothing about it on his own, something that was so frightening it made him tremble.

  On the verge of actually shaking, Haruyuki pinned his avatar down with both hands and switched mental gears. Right now was not the time for thinking about things outside the world that he’d never be able to touch; he need to focus on the precious friends who were, at that very moment, suffering nearby. Rin Kusakabe and Ash Roller had helped Haruyuki any number of times, so this time, he would help them.

  Lifting his face, he spotted a double-arched bridge up ahead, like the aqueducts of Roman times. He peered at it and wondered what it could have been in the real world when Fuko, who had been behind him the whole time, began to explain.

  “I suppose that would be the Yamanote Line bridge and the Shinkansen bridge? Once we go through that and make a left onto Dai-ichi Keihin, Shinagawa Station is basically right there. And then we ride another four or five kilometers north, and we’re at the old Tokyo Tower.”

  The tank went exactly the way Fuko said, and in a few minutes, the chalky tower piercing the distant sky came into view. Reflecting the eternal twilight, the tower was dyed red on the left side and purple on the right. His friends chatting in the rear also moved to the front of the vehicle.

  “Ah, it’s so pretty!” Chiyuri let out a cry of wonder on the party’s behalf. “I’ve never seen the old Tokyo Tower in a Twilight stage before!”

  “Now that you mention it, neither have I,” Haruyuki said, unconsciously competitive.

  “Of course it’s my first time,” Takumu chimed in. “It’s already been ninety years since the real thing was built, and it has a grandeur that really makes you feel that, huh?”

  Aaah, Taku, you always know the right thing to say! Haruyuki thought admiringly.

  “Just like Four Eyes to say something professor-y!” Niko’s voice rang out from the speaker.

  At the moment the red armored trailer rode into Shiba Park east of Minato Ward area—it had become customary to remove the term Ward for all twenty-three Tokyo segments besides Kita Ward and Minato Ward—precisely thirty minutes had passed since the start of their second dive.

  A mere three kilometers north was the east gate of the Castle where their fierce battle with the God Seiryu had unfolded. The thought did cross his mind that it would have been nice if they could have saved their position when they left through the portal, but Brain Burst—in principle, a fighting game—could not be expected to have a such a useful feature as that.

  When the passengers had climbed down from the roof and Niko had returned the Enhanced Armament to storage and landed on the ground, the nine Burst Linkers stood in a row and gazed up at the massive tower, twenty meters or so in diameter.

  In the real world, the old Tokyo Tower was a tapering radio tower made of linked steel, but in the Accelerated World, it appeared as a pillar with the same surface area at the top and bottom. Naturally, the wall was perfectly perpendicular all around, and there was no ladder or elevator.

  When Haruyuki had tried to climb it with his bare hands for his Incarnate training two and a half months earlier, it had been a Wasteland stage and all the buildings had turned into rocky mountains, so the wall before him had been suitably sturdy. But now it was made of smooth marble, with basically no indentations that could act as foot- or handholds. The buildings of the Twilight stage were brittle, so they could probably poke holes in the wall, but…

  “…Master, I’ll ask just in case: What would happen if you made a bunch of holes in this tower…?”

  “It would break, of course.” Fuko grinned. “It would be restored in the next Change, but I don’t think I’d ever forget the fact that you destroyed my house, Corvus.”

  “I—I won’t break it! No way!” Haruyuki flinched into himself.

  “Whoa, Fuko,” Kuroyukihime interjected with a wry laugh. “Don’t threaten my child unduly. Large geographical features in the Unlimited Neutral Field don’t break as easily as all that.”

  “Hee-hee-hee, I suppose that’s so. But I’m a little interested in seeing whether my house would simply float in the air if the tower did break, or if it would come crashing down to the ground.”

  “Hmm. Given that normally, coordinates are fixed, I suppose it would…float…”

  “Oh! If we’re experimenting, I can knock the tower away with my big guns!” The dangerous proposal had no sooner been made than Niko was moving to actually re-summon her Enhanced Armament.

  Pard scooped her up in her arms and silently shook her head.

  “H-hey, Pard! Don’t treat me like a kid! I wasn’t really gonna do it or anything!”

  “…Your voice was dead serious.”

  “…It was.”

  Akira and Utai commented with straight faces while Chiyuri and Takumu burst out laughing. They all giggled together for a minute before Haruyuki returned to the original conversation.

  “Um, so then, just in case, it seems like we should give up on the idea of punching holes in it and climbing up. Which means our only choice is for Master and me to carry everyone, but all at once…is prob’ly not going to work.”

  The height of the tower was near the maximum altitude of Gale Thruster, so Fuko would only be able to fly there with one person. And no matter how Haruyuki looked at it, there was no way he could yank up the remaining six all in one go.

  “You can just take us there in two groups. Sorry, but—,” Kuroyukihime started to say.

  “I can probs climb it,” Pard announced, Niko still tucked under her left arm, as she touched the marble surface with a hand.

  “What?! Leopard, do you happen to have the ability to run up walls?”

  “I took my level-up bonus while we were moving,” the leopard-headed avatar informed them smoothly.

  They all eyed her doubtfully for a moment before crying out in unison—with one exception—“Whooaaa!”

  “B-but Pard, we’re not talking a level-two or -three bonus here! This is seven and eight! Which means they’re basically your last ones. When you’re choosing something like that, you have to spend a week or two weeks or a month or six months just thinking it over,” Haruyuki rattled on without pause.

  “NP.” Pard shrugged lightly and said something astounding. “You make a mistake, it’s
not like there’s no recovery method.”

  The slight breeze of the Twilight stage gusted up and when it died back down, they—except for one—cried out again in surprise.

  “““Whaaaaat?!”””

  “I-is that true, Leopard?!” Kuroyukihime pressed in close. “Even I’ve never heard talk of that!”

  “Seriously, Pard?! You know something like that, you need to be telling me first!” Niko wailed, still being held by Pard.

  But Pard took their sudden hounding in stride. “I just realized it myself. Basically…” Her eyes flicked over to the only person who hadn’t cried out—Aqua Current.

  Handed the baton, Akira simply circulated her flowing water armor for a while, but finally, she murmured, “I don’t really want to say it.”

  “What? You knew as well, Curren? …Mm…Oh…I see. So is that it…?” As she spoke, Kuroyukihime apparently came to understand something, crossed her arms, and abruptly fell silent.

  This was followed by Fuko, Utai, and Niko all murmuring “Oh…”

  And then, for some reason, even Takumu and Chiyuri were muttering, “No way…” and “Perhaps…” until finally, it was only Haruyuki left in the not-understanding zone. Trying to escape from this too-sad situation, he frantically set his mind to work.

  A method of reselecting level-up bonuses. Aqua Current had known about it for a long time. Blood Leopard realized it recently. The common point between the two with regard to leveling up was…

  “Oh! R-right!” When he finally reached this place, a simple answer flashed in the back of his mind, and Haruyuki cried out. The commonality was not leveling up, but leveling down: the God Seiryu’s unique attack, Level Drain.

  While everyone there hesitated to say it out loud, Akira nodded, arcs of flowing water shimmering. “Yes. When you drop levels in Seiryu’s attack, the bonuses you got with the relevant levels also disappear. Put another way, when you reach that level again, you can reselect your bonus.”