Archangel of Savage Light

by Reki Kawahara

  “Def a ghost.”

  “You should have it exorcised right away.”

  “Ha-ha! There aren’t any ghosts in the Accelerated World,” Haruyuki said, laughing.

  Fuko exchanged looks with Pard and Akira, and then smiled in a profoundly meaningful way.

  “Huh? Th-there are…?”

  Instead of answering, the three older girls stepped briskly toward the other side of the pond.

  “Uh! Um! Hey! Please tell me!” Even as he chased after them in a panic, Haruyuki was whirling his head around, looking at his surroundings.

  Once all nine were together by the side of the pond, Kuroyukihime opened her Instruct menu once more and checked the cumulative dive time.

  “As of this moment, ten hours have passed. Unfortunately, I suppose, there has been no Change. The Twilight stage will continue for the time being. These are slightly, but only slightly, disadvantageous conditions for fighting Metatron. But as we also discussed at school, right from the start, it is an impossibility to defeat that Legend-class Enemy in anything other than a Hell stage. We have one objective: break into Midtown Tower and destroy the ISS kit main body. Ultimately, we would ignore Metatron, were it possible. Is there anything else to note so far?”

  “Yes.” Takumu raised his right hand—well, his pile driver. “Master, this is just in case, but…Will Metatron stop attacking once we enter the tower?”

  “Mm…That is a point of concern, it’s true.” Kuroyukihime turned and looked out at the building in question, rising twelve hundred meters to the northwest. “We can’t see it right now, but Metatron is camped out on the top of that building. And it uses its insta-death laser attack on anyone who comes within two hundred meters. Correct so far, yes, Crow?”

  She looked to Haruyuki for confirmation, and he nodded deeply.

  “Yes. I saw Metatron on the roof with my own eyes, although just its silhouette. And also how it evaporated anything that came into its territory with this immensely powerful laser. Two hundred meters was what GW’s Iron Pound told me. Pound said Midtown Tower was a ‘tiny Castle.’”

  “Hmm, that is well said, hmm?” Chuckling, Fuko shifted her gaze from the enormous tower in the distance to Haruyuki and cocked her head slightly to one side. “Corvus, you said ‘anything that came into its territory’ just now. Does that perhaps mean it’s not just Burst Linkers but any object that will get shot down with the laser?”

  “Uh…Um…” Haruyuki sank into thought.

  “Oh, I got it!” Chiyuri cried out. “If Metatron will shoot anything, then we can throw rocks and stuff from outside its range and make it shoot its laser for no reason and use up all its energy, right, Sis?”

  “Yes. It might be a Legend-class Enemy, but it’s not as though it has an infinite energy source. If we can make it fire persistently, that source should be exhausted at some point. Well then, Corvus?”

  The center of everyone’s attention, Haruyuki lifted his face and slowly shook his head. “No…It’s too bad, but I don’t think we can do that. When I was shown Metatron’s laser, Pound deliberately used his own arm as bait. And that rocket punch, once it’s broken, he’s like that until he leaves the stage, right?” He saw Fuko nod and continued, “So then if rocks or something would have done the trick, he would have used his arm. Which means, at the very least, Metatron won’t fire its laser unless part of a duel avatar comes within the two-hundred-meter range…”

  “Mm, I see…What was the time delay like, from the moment it reacted to the intruder until it actually fired the laser?” Kuroyukihime asked.

  “Um.” Haruyuki again replayed the movie from ten days earlier in the back of his mind. “The rocket punch crossed the expressway and then got closer to Midtown Tower…And then a transparent something moved on the top of the tower. It spread these incredibly huge wings, and the wings kind of lit up. And by the time I noticed that, the laser was firing. So from reaction to firing…Right, at most it would have been about two seconds.”

  “Two seconds…It would indeed be difficult to make it across two hundred meters before being fired upon.”

  Everyone nodded at Kuroyukihime’s words.

  Haruyuki felt like it maybe wasn’t impossible for Fuko alone to use her booster one way and fly at top speed to reach the building. But they didn’t know what was waiting inside Midtown Tower. It was hard to believe that the thoroughly prepared Acceleration Research Society would have left guarding the ISS kit main body to Metatron alone. So even if she did succeed in reaching the tower, they could expect more fighting inside, making a lone charge far more dangerous.

  If it had been the Haruyuki from a little while ago, he would have said something reckless and foolish now, like, “It’s all right…I’ll go alone.” But having come through a tumultuous month, Haruyuki had learned that if there were times when you had to fight alone, there were also times when you needed to lean on your friends.

  Thus, as he stepped into the center of the circle they made, Haruyuki said calmly, “It’s all right. I’ll make sure to defend against Metatron’s laser until you all reach the tower.”

  For a moment, none of the others reacted to this, but rather simply stared at him. He started to worry he’d said something stupid yet again.

  “We do appreciate your effort, C,” Utai declared, and then everyone else was talking all in a jumble.

  “Thanks, Haru!”

  “We’re counting on you, ’kay!”

  “I know you will.”

  “I’m trusting you here!”

  “Please do.”

  “We’ll leave it to you, Corvus.”

  And then finally, Kuroyukihime nodded heavily. “Now again, after the Seiryu fight, we are placing a heavy burden on your shoulders. But, Crow, I believe your wings are exactly the thing that is going to break through to the future of Nega Nebulus and the Accelerated World. To destroy the ISS kit main body and clear away the darkness that is trying to fall over the world…and to save our dear friend, lend me your strength.”

  “My strength has always belonged to you, Black King. Just give the order, and I will fly to any height.”

  “I see. Well, then…” Turning toward Haruyuki and advancing, Kuroyukihime stretched the sword of her right hand out. The sharp tip was lit with a soft overlay, and in the next instant, the blade split without a sound to create five fingers. Everyone except Haruyuki gasped, while Kuroyukihime, rather than giving an order, said softly, “Let’s fight. Together.”

  “…Okay!” Haruyuki gently gripped the slender “hand” proffered.

  Previously, Kuroyukihime had only been able to maintain the adapted Incarnate technique, with no attack power whatsoever, for a maximum of about twenty seconds. But once she released Haruyuki’s hand, she shook the hands of the other seven in order. Immediately after she had released Fuko’s, the last, there was a sharp ting! and the five fingers turned back into a sword. The hand had shattered before instead of turning back, so it wasn’t just the time she had made progress with.

  Akira, Utai, and Fuko, who had known Kuroyukihime the longest, must have been impressed. And even after Kuroyukihime returned to her original position, she continued to stare down at her own hand for a while.

  “If Lotus is gonna go that far on us, we gotta throw ourselves into it, too!” Niko cried quite forcefully on behalf of the speechless members of Nega Nebulus. “Up against an Enemy, no need to hold back. We’ll send it flying, Incarnate guns blazing right from the start!”

  Yeah! The cheering voices sent gentle ripples across the pond beside them.

  They took an hour or so for a briefing and nailed down the details of their charge on Midtown Tower. When it was finally five minutes before their scheduled departure, Haruyuki had a sudden thought and moved over to the western edge of the garden once more. He stared intently at the view of Minato Ward spreading out below him. He had only looked at the area around Midtown Tower when he was sitting on the bench with Kuroyukihime, but he remembered now that there was also anothe
r place he ought to be burning into his brain.

  Minato was somewhere he normally never went, so he had even less of a sense of the place than he did of Shibuya. But he sort of spread out a map of Tokyo in the back of his mind and overlaid it on the terrain of the Twilight stage. The wide road cutting across the southern side of the old Tokyo Tower was Ring Road No. 3. On the other side of this was Azabu, with its many embassies from all kinds of countries. Even farther to the south was Minato Ward’s Shirokane, which Haruyuki basically knew only as the name of a ritzy residential area.

  He peered at the Shirokane area where small temple ruins were clustered—although in the real world, they were likely palatial mansions—and saw a fairly large open space in the center. In terms of area, it was closing in on the size of Shiba Park, which sat at the base of old Tokyo Tower’s east side. Still, within the site stood a group of large temples with room to spare between them. All were of a remarkably gorgeous design, and the way they shone ruby-red in the evening sunlight, they looked more like newly constructed buildings than ruins.

  “It has to be…over there…,” Haruyuki muttered, continuing to stare intently at the cluster of temples he needed to burn into his memory.

  It was the girls’ school Kuroyukihime mentioned before they moved, the one that went from elementary all the way through university. In other words, the base of the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe.

  Currently, of the six great Legions, that was the one they had the least connection with. Not only had he not fought them in the Territories, but he couldn’t even remember having had a normal duel with any of its members. The only Linker from the Legion Haruyuki had seen was Ivory Tower, who attended the meeting of the Seven Kings as the White King’s representative, and they didn’t make much of an impression.

  But the White Legion would almost certainly come to stand in the way of Kuroyukihime’s fight for level ten. The White King, White Cosmos, was the one who had manipulated elementary school–age Kuroyukihime and caused the first Red King, Red Rider, to lose all his points, and Kuroyukihime viewed her as her ultimate enemy. The new Nega Nebulus—only just now at a total strength of seven people—was still a long way from standing shoulder to shoulder with the White Legion, but someday, the time for them to fight would come.

  And when it does, I’m totally letting the White King have it. Deceiving your little sister, making her cry, getting her chased out of your house, is that what an older sister—what a parent—does?

  His resolve hardened in his heart as Haruyuki burned Oscillatory Universe’s headquarters into the back of his eyes.

  When he whirled around, Takumu was just raising a hand from the north side of the tower. “Heeey! Haru! Time to get going!”

  “Sorry. I’m coming!” By the time he ran over, his mind had switched gears, back to the Metatron mission.

  5

  Tokyo Midtown was a large, mixed-use facility that had opened for business exactly forty years earlier in 2007. The area was redeveloped after the Ministry of Defense moved to Ichigaya, with a total construction cost of about 370 billion yen. For a private enterprise, it was an unthinkably large project in the eyes of Japan of 2047 and its continually shrinking economy—or so said the article Haruyuki had found online. And as noted in that article, it was even at present one of the top landmarks in the city, alongside nearby Roppongi Hills (itself apparently costing a total of 270 billion yen).

  Midtown Tower, the center of the facility, had a height of 248 meters. Of course, in the forty years since it opened, any number of taller buildings had been built all over Japan, but its majestic appearance, surfaces covered in mirrored glass, still had not lost its freshness. The lower levels were taken up by a bank, doctor’s offices, meeting rooms, and the like, while the central floors were offices. And then the higher floors were occupied by a super-luxury hotel.

  At the meeting of the Seven Kings on Sunday the week before, the destruction of the ISS kit main body had been the main agenda item. At that time, in addition to a head-on attack in which they charged the tower while avoiding Metatron’s blows in the Unlimited Neutral Field, they had also examined the surprise move of first getting into Midtown Tower in the real world and then accelerating.

  Penetrating the office floors was close to impossible, but you could go into the bank on the lower level with a free pass. But the problem was that there was no way to secure a safe place to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field. With a normal duel, which only lasted at most 1.8 seconds, you could manage in the bank lobby, but you didn’t know when a fight in the Unlimited Neutral Field would end. No one could predict how long it would take to move from the first floor to the highest levels and destroy the kit main body. Assuming it ended up being a long-term mission over several days, that would mean nearly ten children occupying a bench in the bank lobby on a full dive for five or ten minutes; there was no doubt that the security guard would come and stop them.

  In the end, if they were going to go with the strategy of accelerating from within Midtown Tower in the real world, they would need to start by diving from the higher floors and quickly destroy the kit main body. But there, they ran into a fresh problem: the expensive luxury hotel that occupied the top floors.

  Before the spread of Neurolinkers and social cameras, no matter how high-class the hotel, anyone could apparently breeze by the front desk and go up to the guest floors. But now with the concept of security greatly changed, gates were in place at pretty much every hotel that would not allow passage without Neurolinker authentication.

  Thus, in order to set foot on the higher floors, they would need to be official guests of the hotel, but even the cheapest rooms started at the special fee of thirty thousand yen a night, and there was no one even at the meeting of the Seven Kings who could simply plop down a sum like that. Perhaps it would have been possible to raise enough for several people to stay there by collecting however much from the members of all the Legions, but the instant they did that, the Legions of the Accelerated World would sink to the level of a real-world outlaw group. Even if they did succeed in destroying the ISS kit main body, they would inevitably bring about an unwelcome change in the nature of the Accelerated World.

  Given all these various circumstances, Haruyuki and his companions were simply walking northwest along a paved road made of cracked marble. To keep from drawing the attention of Enemies or other Burst Linkers with the noise from the engine, they weren’t using Niko’s tank either.

  Niko herself was at the head of the group with Kuroyukihime, while Chiyuri and Takumu were discussing something as they walked alongside each other. Behind them was the parent-and-child team of Akira and Pard, but they didn’t appear to be having any kind of conversation. Haruyuki was walking by himself a little ways off to the side, and Utai and Fuko, seated in her wheelchair, took up the rear.

  Because the old Tokyo Tower and Tokyo Midtown were surprisingly close, with only 1.2 kilometers separating them, even at a slow walk it wouldn’t take the group fifteen minutes to travel there. Several minutes from that moment, the biggest battle Haruyuki had ever been a part of would begin, but his heart was mysteriously silent.

  “…what I had to do…” The words slipped out of him unawares, and apparently hearing this faint murmur, Aqua Current in front of him slowed down to come up beside him.

  “You say something?”

  “Huh? Um. Curren, you have good ears, huh…?”

  “Water transmits sound almost four times better than air.”

  “I—I get it. It’s no big deal. I was just telling myself that I did all the things I had to do for today’s fight.”

  “Things you had to do…” Akira thought that over before saying distinctly, “I might still have something left.”

  “Huh…? You mean something you have to do?”

  “Yes. Before we all accelerated, I went up to level four to enter the Unlimited Neutral Field, but I still haven’t selected those level-up bonuses. And if I use the points I have left, I can go up mo
re levels.”

  “Huh?!” Haruyuki cried out, but then he quickly understood. For over two years, Akira—Aqua Current—had fought in tag teams with low-level Linkers as the Accelerated World’s lone bouncer. As a result, she had claimed successive victories to the point where she had been given the nickname The One, but in the process, she herself would have ended up earning the same number of points as her clients. The higher the opposing team’s level, the more points you got when you won, so Akira had to have amassed a relatively large stash. Enough to be able to go up to level five or six, forget level four.

  Compared with Pard, who immediately went up to level eight, Akira was indeed cautious in stopping at the four required to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field. But…

  “But that’s just how it is,” Haruyuki said. “When I was getting my level-up bonuses, too, I wrestled with it for a super-long time. And I mean, levels, you have to make it so you don’t go up until you’ve got a fair bit of a safety margin, too. I think this thing you have to do is something you should take time to think about. Like, how do you want to grow your duel avatar—I mean, regrow it?”

  Now Aqua Current blinked her pale-blue eye lenses as though surprised. But the expression soon left her face, and a hint of a gentle laugh bled onto her face mask through the film. “…I can’t believe it was only eight months ago when I guarded you on the verge of total point loss.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’ve grown. Proof that you’ve really done the things you needed to do. In the Accelerated World, and in the real world.”

  “Hayuh.” A strange sound slipped out of Haruyuki, and he hurried to add, “I-it’s just you yourself never feel that you’ve grown, you know? I definitely don’t want any regrets in the two missions today, so I was just thinking about whether there’s anything left I need to do or think about while we walk.”

  “You were…” Akira hung her head, as though she were reflecting on herself. “I actually do have something still. Something to do—no, say—before the mission.”