A small crack ran across the armor of his right fist. An agony like he was being stabbed with ice needles raced along his virtual nerves. But it was not enough. Not by a long shot.
That moment, back then.
He’d only watched at that moment, when Metatron transformed her own self into energy and fired Trisagion. He’d only felt her dedication and annihilation from close-up. Wasn’t there actually something he could have done?
Incarnate energy if there wasn’t enough sunlight. His own spirit when his imagination was used up. Hadn’t there still been a way he could have fought alongside her rather than just being protected by her, even it meant he totally fried his nervous system?
“But…But I…!!” He beat down on the ice as hard as he could. Concentric cracks raced outward in the blue mass of ice, and minute fragments of his silver armor scattered. His health gauge decreased, and an intense pain pierced his head.
Again. And again.
The armor on his hands peeled away to reveal the dark gray of his avatar’s naked body. If he kept hitting the ice, his arms themselves would shatter and scatter. But he didn’t care. He would keep tasting this pain until he himself was gone.
As if in response to Haruyuki’s feelings, a strong wind started to blow, and a snowstorm fell upon the stage. Wrapped in swirling white flakes, he moved to bring his peeling fists down hard on the ice again.
…still…there.
He felt like he heard someone’s voice from far off in the distance somewhere. He stopped breathing. Hands still in the air, he cleared his ears. In the middle of the roaring snowstorm, he desperately sought out the voice.
…you’re…still…there.
It was calm—a silky-smooth mezzo-soprano. A female voice…but different from Metatron’s sweet, clear soprano. It wasn’t Kuroyukihime’s or Fuko’s or the voice of anyone Haruyuki knew.
“Who are you…?” he asked hoarsely, slowly lowering his hands. “What’s still there…?”
…am…terasu. Meta…sworn friend.
Like tuning an old radio transmission, the voice gradually grew louder and clearer. Haruyuki forgot about the pain in his hands and focused his mind intently.
…The link to…Meta…core is…still inside y…
…It depends on you whether the core can be recovered. On the strength of this power you all call Incarnate.
…There’s not much time left. Before the core vanishes…
…Reach out your hand. If you…then…surely…
The voice receded rapidly and disappeared.
No matter how hard he listened, all he could hear was the roar of the blizzard. He almost believed it had been an auditory hallucination brought on by his endless regret, but it couldn’t have been. The link with Metatron was still inside Haruyuki. The mysterious voice’s proclamation had been entirely unexpected.
“Inside…of me…,” he muttered, dumbfounded, and then clenched his hands together tightly. Metatron’s core could be recovered if he had enough Incarnate power…That’s what the voice had said. And also that there was no time.
If there was even a chance, he had to take it. But he didn’t know what he should do. To activate the Incarnate System, a focused imagination was necessary. But he had absolutely no idea what the shape of the image would be or its target…
He was on the verge of looking around to try to find the someone who had told him this, but he restrained himself. There’s no one but me here. The only one who can reach out to Metatron is me. This is a time when I have to think by myself, work by myself, and make it happen by myself. My promise to Metatron…the promise to see the end of the world together, it’s now.
If he still had a connection with Metatron, then the key to it was the wings. The Enhanced Armament, Metatron Wings, that the Archangel had loaned him—the wings that had saved Haruyuki from a crashing death in the final moments of the battle with Mark II.
He knelt on the ice, clasped his hands together in front of his face, and imagined them. Elegant, sharp, pure-white wings stretching out a little above his shoulder blades. Metatron had warned him of danger any number of times through those wings. That sensation…that connection, one more time.
He closed his eyes. The raging storm, the pain in his hands, the cold enveloping his body—it all receded. In the darkness, the image of transient wings stretching out. The image of rising up higher and higher until he reached the end of this world. The image of breaking out of the Mean Field, the Unlimited Neutral Field…Flying to the Highest Level…
“Metatron.
“Can you hear me, Metatron?
“I’m here. I’ve spread the wings you gave me, and I’m flying through the world you loved.
“And I’m reaching a hand out to you.”
Shik!
A small star flickered in the distance in the infinite darkness. A white light so ephemeral, so weak it looked like it would disappear at any second…but from it came a hazy warmth.
Flapping his wings as hard as he could, Haruyuki reached out. Fwnk, fwnk. The flickering light was so far away, and his arms were far too short. But distance wasn’t the problem. If he believed he could reach…If he changed all the energy his mind produced into the power of belief—if he could just reach out a little farther, a little bit more…See?
Gently, softly, he wrapped the light up in the palms of his hands. And opened his eyes.
The dancing snowflakes. The smashed ice floor. And icicles hanging from his hands, frozen hard—still clasped together. Slowly, he pulled his hands apart. Icicles dropped off, hit the ground, and shattered. Bit by little bit, he opened his hands up.
But there was nothing there. The whirling snow stuck to his gray palms and colored them white. Was it all an illusion? A brief dream he’d had in the freezing storm?
No. A tiny point of light, smaller than a single ice crystal, shone faintly in the center of his palm.
Shik, shik. It flickered on a definite cycle, like a beacon to guide travelers through the blizzard. Or like the pulsing of a heart.
Curling up his hand to protect the spot of light from the cold, Haruyuki gently exhaled. The flashing gradually grew faster. The cycle of once per second became three times…and then ten. Finally, Haruyuki’s eye was no longer able to perceive the amplitude as it stabilized into a state of continuous light.
The light puffed out to become a ring about two centimeters across. Below the ring, a long, slender spindle appeared. And then two small wings stretched out from either side of that. The entire thing was tinged with a milky-white light.
There was no way he was seeing wrong. This was the three-dimensional icon of Metatron that had guided Haruyuki in the Acceleration Research Society headquarters. Was it the real thing? Or a momentary vision produced by his imagination?
Ever so timidly, he moved his hand to gently stroke the spindle with his index finger. He touched it. It had substance. And a hazy heat that penetrated the core of his body.
“…Meta. Tron…,” he said in a shaking voice, going to touch the icon again.
“Such…insolence!!”
A powerful scolding voice slammed into the center of his brain, and Haruyuki reeled, landing on his backside. The icon slipped from his palm and began to hover about ten centimeters above his head, vibrating its wings.
“Do you think a servant such as yourself is permitted to touch me in such a fashion, Silver Crow?! As punishment for this rude act, I shall extend your period of service to me by five hundred years!!”
“……”
For a moment, he stared up at the icon, dumbfounded. And then abruptly, his field of view warped. Beneath his goggles, he felt hot liquid spilling from his eye lenses. These fell from the bottom of his face mask and instantly melted the snow piled up on his avatar’s armor. The hot tears welled up one after another.
It wasn’t a vision. Just as the mysterious voice had told him, she hadn’t vanished. The details of the logic weren’t clear, but the link with Haruyuki had remained, and on the brink o
f extinction, Metatron’s spirit had been revived by his activation of that circuit.
Unable to speak, he simply let the tears spill from his eyes, and Metatron’s tone softened just a little.
“At any rate, it should have been possible to guess that I had evaded complete extinction at the point when the wings I loaned you remained even after the link was cut. To begin with, it’s quite impossible for me to disappear in a battle with an enemy on that level. You are my servant; understand at least the scale of your master’s power. However, that said, I shall commend you on being able to reestablish the link with me. Unfortunately, at the moment, I am unable to bestow a proper reward…”
That was the limit. Unable to hold back the emotions that swelled up in him, Haruyuki reached out, wrapped his arms around the icon, and hugged it to his chest.
“Ah! Come now! What are you doing?!”
Feeling fond of the vibration of the small wings and the hazy warmth of the light, he murmured, “Welcome back, Metatron. I’m so glad that you’re…you’re…” He managed to get that far somehow, but his sobs got in the way, and the rest of his sentence failed to become words.
As the storm started to calm, he curled into a ball on top of the ice and wept. He sobbed out loud like a small child. The vibration in the palm of his hand changed to a gentle pulsation, as if she had resigned herself to this indignity or to soothe him, and the spindle got a little hotter. The gentle warmth eased the pain in his injured hands.
Without noticing that the snow had stopped at some point, the sun shining through gaps in the thick clouds, Haruyuki continued to cry for a long time.
(The End)
AFTERWORD
Thank you so much for reading Accel World 16: Snow White’s Slumber. I had a hazy image of the scene in this volume where Snow White, aka Shirayukihime, appears back when I was writing the first volume, Kuroyukihime’s Return. Volume 1 was published in February 2009, but I submitted it for the fifteenth Dengeki Novel Prize with a deadline of April of the previous year, so I actually started writing it in the fall of 2007. In other words (counting on my fingers)…that was more than six years ago at the moment when I am writing this afterword in December 2013, hmm?
When I was writing the manuscript for the first volume, although I imagined where the story would end up, I had neither the will nor the intention to continue writing it up to that point, so I am deeply grateful that I was finally able to make it to that scene after the undeserved honor of the prize, having the book published by Dengeki Bunko, being supported by so many readers, and telling this tale for six years and sixteen volumes. Accel World is truly a blessed work. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to everyone who’s supported me.
…Blah blah blah—I write like it’s the last book, but that is absolutely not the case. (*sweats*) And just when the great Shirayukihime/Snow White finally makes an appearance, she basically shows her face and then immediately leaves. And there’s still tons of mysteries, all kinds of problems that have just piled up…
The truth is, this isn’t the time to get all maudlin, is it? The ISS kit arc that was at last resolved in this volume started in Volume 11, which came out in April 2012, so I’ve had all of you spending a full year and a half with those black eyeballs. Frighteningly, in the calendar in the story, Volume 11 begins on June 23, 2047, and Volume 16 begins on June 30, so time has only advanced a week over six volumes…And Volume 6, when the Armor of Catastrophe arc started, was on the sixteenth of the same month! No wonder it seemed like it was always raining!
That said, I sincerely apologize for the fact that although I announced in the afterword of Volume 14 that the arc would end in the next book, it clearly did not—and that the afterword of Volume 15 ended up being two Accel Lunch comics. We’ve finally reached a place where we can take a breath, but the story will still continue. A brighter story in which there is no Armor or eyeballs…or that’s the plan anyway. At the very least, I think the rainy season will be over!
Thank you to my illustrator, HIMA, who I always cause problems for as my schedule delays become chronic, and my editors, Miki and Tsuchiya! And all you readers, I look forward to our sixth year together!
Reki Kawahara
On a certain day in December 2013
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Snow White’s Slumber Page 18