Archangel of Savage Light

by Reki Kawahara

  His heart rose up in his throat for a second, but fortunately—he supposed—Akira’s gaze was turned not on Haruyuki to her left, but on Pard walking up ahead. “Leopard.”

  Her name called, the leopard-headed avatar twitched her triangle ears before slackening her pace and arriving at Haruyuki’s left. Pinned between the two of them for some reason, Haruyuki shrank into himself.

  “Leopard—Myah,” Akira began speaking to her scion over his head. “I have to apologize to you.”

  “…”

  The words were rather sudden, but apparently understanding that this was not the whole of it, Pard said nothing in response. Without the slightest visible reaction, she continued to walk silently forward.

  Akira also turned her gaze ahead and began to speak again after a slight pause. “I’m sorry about that time. I was wrong.”

  Once again, Pard didn’t make a move to reply. Her steps utterly soundless, she stayed fifty centimeters to Haruyuki’s left. Unable to endure the increasingly strained atmosphere, Haruyuki was about to quietly fall back when—

  “NP,” Pard murmured, and Haruyuki nearly let out a sigh of relief. But the instant he heard the words that followed, the virtual air got stuck in his throat. “…Or not. I was really angry. Incredibly. Than I’ve ever been.”

  Given that the impatient alien Pard had always sought brevity in her utterances and was now using three different emphasizers, she must certainly have been, without exaggeration, seriously angry. What on earth had Akira done to her “child” Pard?

  As Haruyuki jerked his legs back and forth, his upper body completely frozen, Akira turned to him and explained briefly, “A little while ago, I tried to erase Leopard’s memory.”

  “What…?!” Haruyuki stumbled in his surprise, and Pard quickly grabbed his left arm to hold him up. But unable to take this in, Haruyuki simply stared at Akira. The flowing water that covered her face mask shuddered and her voice flowed out once more.

  “Even after my avatar was sealed away at the Castle and I stopped dueling except for guarding, I still saw and talked with Leopard in the real sometimes. I wanted her to stop the freeze on leveling up. I might be her parent, but the members of Prominence couldn’t have thought too highly about her ceasing to level for the sake of another Legion’s member. Plus, someone might have tried a PK on her, eyes set on her vast sum of points. But no matter how many times I said it, Myah wouldn’t listen.” Akira let out a brief sigh, generating a few bubbles from the inside of her watery mask.

  “You need a large sum of points to resist Seiryu’s Level Drain,” Pard said, nearly whispering, still holding Haruyuki’s arm. “It was you, Aki, who taught me that. You.”

  “I’ve regretted telling you any number of times.”

  Here, their conversation stopped, and Haruyuki timidly asked, “…So then you tried to erase Pard’s memories of Seiryu?”

  “Not quite. My Memory Leak technique isn’t as handy as all that. I explained a little before the Territories yesterday, but what I can erase is only memories related to me.”

  “What?! …S-so then what you tried to erase was…you, Curren…,” Haruyuki babbled, dumbfounded, when suddenly, he felt an intense pressure in his left arm. He looked to see Pard squeezing the thin armor of his upper arm as hard as she could—although her claws had fortunately been tucked away. This sensation triggered a memory from a dozen or so hours earlier: the brief exchange between Blood Leopard and Aqua Current immediately after she made it back from Seiryu’s altar alive.

  —I told you…You were supposed to forget me.

  —Can’t forget your parent.

  “You were…serious…,” Haruyuki murmured.

  Akira nodded slightly. “I tried to take her by surprise in her bedroom and have a direct duel. But when I was this close…”—she held finger and thumb about three centimeters apart—“…she got out of my pin.”

  In his heart, Haruyuki thought that only stood to reason. The real Akira Himi was probably in the same grade as Haruyuki, while Pard, whose real name he still didn’t know (but was likely something close to Myah), was in grade ten, like Fuko. Adding in the height difference and that Pard must have had a fair bit of upper body strength, given the way she handled that large electric motorcycle, it would have been difficult to hold her down and force her to direct.

  Put another way, Current had gone to those lengths to erase Pard from inside her. As a parent, to protect her child…

  “It’s not that I didn’t understand how you felt, Aki,” Pard said quietly, relaxing her grip on Haruyuki slightly. “The reason I was angry is because you thought you could make me forget you. No matter what you do, there’s no way I’d forget. Not just in the real world, but in the Accelerated World, too, you’re my precious…” She didn’t say the words that came next, but rather slowly released Haruyuki’s arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Akira apologized again. “I thought you’d end up in a sealed state, too, Myah. But I was wrong. And even with my avatar sealed away, I kept moving forward bit by bit. You were the same. Leveling up isn’t the only way to get stronger. I should have known that better than anyone.”

  “That’s right, Curren.”

  Surprised by this voice, Haruyuki looked up and saw Kuroyukihime, who had appeared right before him at some point. Advancing with a hovering motion, she had only her upper body turned back.

  It wasn’t just Kuroyukihime. He’d thought Chiyuri, Takumu, Fuko, and Utai were focused on their individual conversations ahead of and behind him, but all, and even Niko, were moving in a circle around Haruyuki, Akira, and Pard. Apparently, they all had been listening in.

  Kuroyukihime turned to Akira. “I also cut myself off from the global net for two years and locked myself up in a tiny shell, but…recently, I’ve come to think that even that time was not wasted. The past and the present, and the future as well, they’re connected. All the time that has passed creates ‘now.’ This ‘now,’ when I am walking here with you like this.”

  “And, like, Current.” The Red King, who was walking nimbly beside the Black King, started to speak. “I mean, not thinking too much of Pard’s level freeze, that wasn’t it at all, y’know? Of course, no one but me knew the details or anything, but even still, they all understood. They were rooting for her. Like, Pard’s fighting for some kid who’s really important to her. And basically, I’m just saying here, but me and Pard fighting with Nega Nebulus like this in and of itself is a betrayal of the Legion if you’re looking at it from outside. But I believe in them. Once this is all over and I explain what the what is, all thirty-two of Promi’s members are gonna understand just fine.” Done speaking, Niko whirled around again, but Akira still stayed silent for a while.

  Abruptly, she looked up at the madder-red sky. The flowing water of her entire body shone with the reflection of the eternal evening sun.

  “Precisely because there is the past, there is now…” Her voice was quiet, like the babbling of a small stream, but it sank deep into Haruyuki’s mind and probably the minds of everyone else there. “The now is connected, and the future is born. Maybe because I gained the power to interfere just a little with the past, the now and the future receded from me. If I’d been able to accept the past, maybe I would have forgotten…that now is something that shines so brightly…”

  At some point, they had all stopped, and the group now stood in the middle of the wide street, looking up at the sky.

  Haruyuki couldn’t help but see himself in Akira’s words. For him, the past was hard and painful, a stratum of memory he’d like to forget if he could. No matter where he dug in it, the scenes unearthed only stabbed at his heart. But the truth was that any number of small, shining fragments were buried in there, too: Kuroyukihime appearing in the virtual squash corner of the Umesato Junior High local net. The children’s park where he ran around playing with Chiyuri and Takumu, covered in mud. And the distant, distant memory of walking in the evening in Koenji, holding hands with his parents.

  The Brai
n Burst program stretched out “now” a thousand-fold. Maybe it was escapist. A shelter to run to from painful reality where you could heal your wounds together with companions similarly suffering; maybe this was also one part of the nature of the Accelerated World. But that was certainly not all of it. This expanded “now” also included the past and the future. You could find precious gems in the past expanded by a thousand, and you could see the future that would come at some point, with a thousand times the clarity. That was this place, the Accelerated World.

  “…Let’s bring them together,” Fuko murmured from behind him, her voice reminiscent of a slight spring breeze. “The past to the future. To that end…Let’s fight now with all our might.” She pointed a slender hand up to the northwest.

  A massive silhouette there cut out a dark piece of the evening sky.

  They’d come within a distance of five hundred meters already.

  Midtown Tower: Round marble pillars stood lining the walls with stone statues—somehow divine, somehow eerie—adorning the capitals. Straining his eyes to peer at the upper part of the tower, he saw nothing, as usual—but he could definitely feel it. The presence of something lording over the world below from far up on high.

  Unable to endure the heavy invisible pressure, Haruyuki started to step back.

  And then like Fuko, Kuroyukihime raised her right hand, turning the sharp tip of her sword toward the peak of the tower. The indomitable Niko clenched her small hand into a fist and thrust it up. Akira and Pard followed suit, and Utai and Chiyuri did the same soon after. Takumu brandished his Pile Driver, and finally, Haruyuki poured all the fighting spirit he could muster into his right hand and pointed it at the top of Midtown Tower.

  This gesture naturally had no attack power. But Haruyuki could definitely see how the will released by their nine hands fused to become a beam that pierced the sky and reached the distant tower. And a massive silhouette casually twisting on the top of that tower.

  “It seems our declaration of war has been received,” Kuroyukihime announced boldly, slashing directly down with the sword of her right hand. When they all brought their hands down, the ebony avatar turned back and said, “Well then, let’s confirm our strategy once more here. According to the information Haruyuki received from Iron Pound, Metatron’s aggro range has a radius of two hundred meters. But if we inch right up to the edge of it and we end up attacked first, this will all be for naught, so our standby position is two hundred and fifty meters from the Tower.”

  Kuroyukihime bent forward and drew a small square with the tip of her sword in the white paving stone. She surrounded this with another large square.

  “The small square is Midtown Tower, the big one is the Tokyo Midtown site. The northern half of the site is a park, and there are basically no obstacles up to the tower. Thus, our charge will be from the park in the north. First, Silver Crow will take the lead from the standby position and stop at the point where Metatron reacts. Two seconds later, the laser will be fired, so once we confirm that it can be defended with the Optical Conduction ability, you move forward and the rest of us will follow. I expect we’ll reach the tower before a second shot is fired, but if we don’t make it, Crow stops in the lead once more and deals with the laser. That is the basic plan.”

  This was the strategy he’d already heard on the roof of the old Tokyo Tower, but Haruyuki was made aware all over again of the importance of the role he’d been given.

  He would absolutely repel Metatron’s laser. This resolve was unshakable, but what if…in the worst case, he managed to defend against the first shot of the laser but not the second? It wouldn’t just be Haruyuki then; all his friends would also die instantly deep in Metatron’s territory, and then be hit with the laser and die again after they regenerated. They might end up in Unlimited EK. Whatever else happened, he had to prevent that at least from happening. He had to.

  “…Once you turn right at that intersection you can see there, you’re at the park, our standby position. First, we’ll check if there are any other Enemies in the area…”

  Kuroyukihime continued giving instructions, and as he listened, Haruyuki stroked the metallic armor of his right arm with the tips of his fingers. A groove that hadn’t been there before ran along it from wrist to elbow: It was a light-guiding rod that had appeared together with the awakening of his Optical Conduction ability. It hardly stood out at all compared with the silver wings on his back, but it was definitely there, proof of his new power.

  Please. Protect everyone…and Rin, too, Haruyuki murmured to a small part of his heart, before clenching his hand into a resolute fist.

  Approximately fifteen hours of inside time since their first dive…

  The seven members of Nega Nebulus and the two from Prominence stood at the starting point for their final mission, the attack on Archangel Metatron. They stood at the edge of Midtown Garden, spreading out to the north of Tokyo Midtown.

  With basically no buildings inside the park, there was only a smooth grassy field between them and the enormous tower soaring up into the sky two hundred and fifty meters ahead. All they had to do now was get into the agreed formation and move on the tower. Or so he thought.

  “…Huh? What’s that…?” Chiyuri muttered, baffled, the moment the large park entered their field of view. The others also halted in front of the marble arch that was the entrance to the park.

  On the north side of the grass, there was something strange about thirty meters from Metatron’s attack range. An enormous, elliptical object. But it wasn’t a perfect ellipse; the lower part grew heavily fatter, while the upper part looked like it narrowed in. It was perhaps six or seven meters tall with a circumference of about four meters.

  “What the—? Doesn’t look like an Enemy, though…,” Niko said, narrowing her eye lenses. Scarlet Rain had an ability called Vision Extension, allowing her to “see” types of information that couldn’t normally be seen. But Haruyuki could also tell that the elliptical body was no Enemy. Because no matter how many times he blinked, he saw no health gauge.

  “An object that was originally in the park in the real world was re-created here…maybe?”

  Haruyuki was about to agree with Takumu, but that opinion was rejected by Fuko.

  “No, as far as I know, there’s no object like that in this place. And if it was re-created in the Twilight stage, it should be white marble.”

  “True. This sphere—or rather, egg—how can we express the color of it? Sort of black, sort of green, sort of brown…”

  Just as Kuroyukihime said, in the red evening sun, all that could be said was the elliptical body was a fairly concentrated color. But more than the color, Haruyuki felt like the word egg triggered something in his memory. Like he had seen something before in the Accelerated World and thought, It’s like an egg. Or maybe he hadn’t?

  “Hey, Haru?” Chiyuri murmured quietly, having come up beside him. “I—I feel like I’ve seen something like this somewhere before.”

  “Huh? You too?”

  “You mean, you do, too?”

  They exchanged glances and then cocked their heads to the same side—and cried out briefly at the same time, “Oh!”

  Unaware of the doubtful eyes of Kuroyukihime and the others turned their way, they stared once more at the blackish object.

  He had actually seen something that looked very much like this. And only four days ago. In the Unlimited Neutral Field where he had dived with Chiyuri looking for a chance to obtain the Theoretical Mirror ability. And it hadn’t been an object—a “thing.” Nor an Enemy nor an Enhanced Armament. But a Burst Linker, just like Haruyuki and the others.

  “B-but, Chiyu, he’s…so big,” Haruyuki babbled hoarsely.

  And then.

  A red light blossomed in the jet-black part of the massive elliptical body, where the evening sun didn’t reach. Not a reflection of the western sun. A deeper, more concentrated red, the red of fresh blood. The light flickered two or three times. The instant he saw that biologic
al movement, Haruyuki instinctively knew: The source of the light was an eye. An Enhanced Armament in the form of a crimson eyeball.

  An ISS kit.

  “That’s…the enemy!” Haruyuki shouted in a trance, and everyone there braced themselves.

  The elliptical body moved. It pulled itself up heavily, shuddering slowly, almost like a great beast awakening from a long slumber. The lower half of the black egg, sunk into the grass, hid short legs.

  “Enemy?! An Enemy?!” Kuroyukihime cried, baffled.

  “No!” Haruyuki hurriedly shook his head. “A Burst Linker!”

  “B-but this size…”

  Her skepticism was only natural. Now that it had stood up, the egg-shaped avatar was taller than the Red King with her Enhanced Armament fully deployed. And while the “he” Haruyuki had seen four days earlier had been enormous for a duel avatar, it hadn’t been this aberrant size. Haruyuki didn’t know why he had grown to three times that size or what he was doing here now, but it was a fact that he was an ISS kit user, and at the same time—

  “He’s Magenta Scissor’s friend,” Chiyuri finished Haruyuki’s thought out loud, and the tension amongst their group immediately grew.

  Takumu’s reaction was particularly remarkable; inhaling sharply, he readied the pile driver of his right arm. “So then, a preemptive strike!”

  “Wait, Taku!” Haruyuki hurried to stop Takumu, who was about to charge forward. “Physical effects totally don’t work on this guy! His weak points, I’m pretty sure it’s fire and, um…”

  “Freeze plus strike!” Chiyuri—naturally—cried out, but there was none among the nine who could use ice. Instead, they had two Burst Linkers who were skilled with flame attacks.

  “Let me at ’im!”

  “Us!”

  Niko and Utai sprang to the front and got into position. A crimson overlay enveloped Niko’s fist, while a flame arrow burned brightly in Utai’s long bow.

  “If possible, aim for the ISS kit!” Kuroyukihime let a sharp command fly toward the two small yet reliable backs. “Be careful of Incarnate technique counterattacks! Fire!”