The Binary Stars of Destiny

by Reki Kawahara

  “Sorry, Taku.” His muttered apology probably didn’t reach his friend, but Haruyuki looked at the broad back of his good friend and clenched his teeth.

  Six minutes, twenty seconds remaining. He would at least shed his negative image in that time. He would do whatever he could without thinking it was impossible. So then what could he do? Beautiful baskets, sharp dribbling, these things were beyond Haruyuki. But there should have been something that one enormous obstacle could do. Obstacle…

  Haruyuki’s eyes flew open, and he immediately began fiddling with his virtual desktop at top speed.

  There was a variety of functions in the gym ball-sports app carefully produced by the Ministry of Education, but ball games and AR displays were fundamentally incompatible—because obviously, the display got in the way of seeing the key bit of the whole operation, the ball—so AR was basically used only to display an overlay for the points and the time in the game at the edge of a player’s field of view. They could have played just as well without their Neurolinkers, but they weren’t allowed to because the school was legally obligated to monitor the heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure of students exercising.

  But when Haruyuki opened a tab for the court status in the app, it gave him a bird’s-eye view just below the center of his vision. Five round red marks, five blue moved irregularly in a diagonal rectangle. These were obviously the current positions of the players. He narrowed them down to two with a filter function. The remaining red circle was himself. The blue was the enemy ace, Ishio.

  The instant the game started again with the enemy throw-in, Haruyuki moved noisily and held out his arms right above the line connecting the ball he could see with his eyes and Ishio moving behind him. He tried to ruin any pass opportunities for Ishio simply by waving his arms frantically and making his already wide body larger. The members of the Gallery burst out laughing at his ridiculous movements, but the enemy player holding the ball clicked his tongue lightly and passed sideways to another player. Yet Haruyuki ran several meters to the left at the same time and began waving his arms up and down again.

  This was the “something” he could do.

  The opposing team’s strategy was a “post” play to bulldoze through the game, using the ace posted around the basket. Since Haruyuki knew the ball was eventually going to be thrown toward the low post area, he first had to get an accurate understanding with the AR display of Ishio’s position behind him, and then be an “obstacle” in the trajectory connecting Ishio and the ball.

  Given the momentum Haruyuki generated, a perfect man-to-man defense clinging to the ace himself was simply not possible, but if he guessed at the pass route and optimized the distance he moved, Haruyuki might be able to keep filling this role until the end of the game.

  The opposing player indicated he was going to throw the ball directly to one side once more, so Haruyuki also started to move in that direction.

  However, on the verge of doing so, he put on the emergency brakes. Ishio, three meters or so behind him, was running in the opposite direction. It was a feint. With the right foot that slammed into the ground, Haruyuki managed to absorb the inertial mass and throw his body to the right. His earnestly outstretched right hand smacked hard into the ball the opposing player threw. As it was about to bounce off somewhere, he unconsciously killed his force with the way-of-the-flexible trick from Brain Burst and pulled the ball toward him, holding it tightly against his chest.

  “No way!”

  Haruyuki was thinking the same thing his opposition shouted, eyelids peeled back. But if he let himself be dumbfounded there, Ishio would come up from behind and snag the ball from him again.

  “Hey!”

  Haruyuki heard the voice from his left and reflexively threw the ball, this time without bringing it above his head. The player on his team who caught it—a member of the swim team called Nakagawa—dribbled the ball for a few meters into the enemy camp and passed to their team’s ace, Takumu, running up on the right side.

  Catching it firmly, Takumu headed toward the enemy basket in a fierce charge—Haruyuki would expect nothing less from a blue type—and finished up with a magnificent jump shot, making good use of his height. A light beep sound effect echoed in his ears, and the score display changed to 27–38.

  “Nice, Arita!” Nakagawa called out to him, having promptly returned to their side of the court. Grinning, the typically buff swimmer raised his right hand, and Haruyuki, reflexively thinking, He’s going to hit me! somehow managed nonetheless to lift his right hand and accept the high five.

  Takumu ran up from behind and simply exchanged a quick smile with him, but that was still enough to communicate what needed to be said.

  In the just under six minutes that were left, Haruyuki ran, ran, and ran. A waterfall of sweat poured down his face and drenched his body, he panted heavily, and his legs and arms trembled, but he didn’t stop moving. His field of view—no, his mind—was filled with nothing but the ball in front of him and Ishio behind him. He imagined the course he should take in relation to those two and simply traced it out. Image and execution.

  In one corner of his mind, becoming somewhat hazy at last, Haruyuki abruptly remembered that he had had a very similar experience only a few days earlier.

  Exactly. When he was cleaning the animal hutch in the rear yard by himself. After thinking hard about exactly how he was going to clean up the mountain of old leaves piled up there, so many that it seemed it would be impossible to remove them by hand, he had imagined the result and then simply trusted in that, setting his hands to work. That had also been a difficult job, but in the end, the seemingly infinite number of dead leaves was gone.

  Of course, a basketball game and cleaning a hutch were totally different. But maybe at the root, they were similar in what could be called the essence of action. He was pretty sure, though, that he had started to realize something more important at the time.

  Words someone had spoken to him in that other world echoed faintly in the back of his mind.

  …An image…strongly projected from the consciousness…overcomes restraints and becomes real.

  Words to explain the other power hidden there. The ultimate power surpassing the normal system framework, close to a supernatural phenomenon. A miracle that shouldn’t exist in the real world. And though that logic might be incredibly simple—

  Even as he thought this through, Haruyuki continued to intently run back and forth. Naturally, he couldn’t prevent every single pass to Ishio with his hastily prepared block. Sometimes, he was unable to get in the way of the ball being handed over, and in those instances, the enemy ace racked up points. Although they had closed the gap to a five-point difference with Takumu and Nakagawa’s counterattack, from there, it was one step forward, one step back; only the remaining time steadily decreased.

  However, at some point, Haruyuki had removed the timer and even the score display from his consciousness. From the Gallery came the occasional commotion, mixed with laughter, but none of it reached Haruyuki’s ears.

  Hah. Hah.

  Listening only to his heavy breathing and the pounding of his heart echoing in his ears, he focused intently on tracing the expected image for the next second. He had nothing left over for attacking, but if he could simply counterbalance the weight of the opposing team and his own team one-for-one, the remaining four players should be more than even.

  Once they were down to two minutes left, the two players on his team who had been guarding Ishio also went on the offensive, pushing through the gaps in the bewildered enemy defense to shove the ball through the hoop.

  Three-point difference.

  “Over here!”

  Frustration building—and with good reason—Ishio returned to the far end of his team’s side and raised a hand to accept the throw-in directly. His two former guards from the red team tried to obstruct his movement forward once more, but in a lightning-fast spin, Ishio pulled out and away from them. Apparently, the “real technique” of
the basketball team regular had been locked away until then.

  Vision blurred by sweat, Haruyuki stood, paralyzed, in the face of Ishio charging at him. One-on-one, dead-on, the Neurolinker AR display was of absolutely no help to him.

  Physical Burst!!

  Haruyuki desperately fought back the urge to call out the command.

  If he used Physical Burst—which accelerated his perceptions by a factor of ten while his mind was still lodged in his physical body—it would be a simple feat to steal the ball from Ishio, no matter what dribbling technique he tried to use. But this so-called cowardly acceleration was strictly forbidden by his Legion. And besides, it was an insult to Ishio, who was taking on the challenge of a true fight.

  “Ah…Aaaaaah!” What Haruyuki could do unaccelerated was simply shout as he spread out his arms as far as they would go.

  The flesh-and-blood left hand of Ishio flashed before Haru’s eyes, and the ball disappeared from view. The instant Haruyuki realized Ishio was dribbling behind his back, Ishio was already dashing past Haruyuki’s left side.

  Even though he knew he couldn’t possibly catch up with the enemy ace as he charged ahead toward his team’s basket, Haruyuki went after him.

  After he had run a few steps, an unfamiliar red font flashed before his eyes. A warning that his heart rate or his blood pressure or something had gone outside the normal range. But he ignored it. He resolutely chased after the hazy figure in the center of his field of view, which was starting to flicker and white out around the edges.

  And then he stared, dumbfounded, as a silhouette as tall as Ishio stood on the other side of the ace, blocking him. At some point, Takumu had returned to directly below the basket. With him going into a match-up defense, Ishio pulled out all the stops. Ball between the legs—crossover.

  “Hngh…Hah!” Spitting out the last of the air remaining in his lungs, Haruyuki dove with everything he had toward the ball Ishio was attempting to dribble behind his back.

  The tips of his painfully outstretched hand touched the bumpy rubber—or didn’t. Haruyuki wasn’t sure. Because his vision went completely black then, and his thinking abruptly decelerated. The front of his own body hit something big and hard, and just as he realized it was likely the floor of the gymnasium, he heard a high-pitched voice shout from somewhere in the distance.

  “Haru!”

  Definitely Chiyuri, who was herself in the middle of a game on the neighboring court.

  Come on. Focus on your own game. With this final thought, listening to the footsteps racing over to him, Haruyuki lost consciousness.

  Something thin was inserted into his mouth, so he tried sucking on it, and a sweet, cold liquid flowed in. He drank it in a daze, eyes still closed. After sending the liquid down to his stomach in gulps that made it almost hard to breathe, he inhaled deeply.

  When he tentatively opened his eyes, he was confronted with a bright white light. He hurriedly closed his eyelids, blinked several times, and then opened his eyes once more.

  The source of the light was panels embedded in the ceiling. That, and the white curtains enclosing his field of view in a square. It would seem that this was not the gym. And beneath his body was not the hard floor but rather smooth sheets—a bed.

  Before he could wonder where he was, the curtain at the foot of the bed was pulled open with a light sound.

  “Oh! Arita, you’re awake?” Appearing there was a woman with midlength hair pulled back, wearing a crisp white doctor’s coat over a patterned T-shirt—Umesato Junior High’s health teacher. Last name: Hotta. Which meant this was the nurse’s office, situated at the eastern end of the first floor of the school’s second building.

  “Oh…um…I…,” Haruyuki muttered, and an exasperated smile appeared on Ms. Hotta’s somewhat masculine face.

  “It’s important to try hard in games, but you have to watch your own condition, too, okay?” she said. “If your blood pressure had gotten any lower, you’d have been in an ambulance.”

  “O-okay. I’m sorry.”

  So that’s it. I collapsed in the middle of the basketball game from anemia or dehydration or something, and they brought me to the nurse’s office.

  Now that he finally understood the situation, Haruyuki glanced over at the time display in the lower right of his field of view and saw that second period had started a long time ago. He had apparently been unconscious—or sleeping—for over half an hour.

  The health teacher deftly flicked around her virtual desktop and checked that Haruyuki’s vital signs were all back to normal before nodding lightly. “Rest here during second period. And get plenty of fluids, okay? I have a meeting in the teachers’ room to go to, but don’t hesitate to press the call button if anything happens. Okay, be good!”

  Shhk! The curtain was closed once more, and the sound of footsteps softened by slippers receded. Finally, he heard the door opening and closing, and then the nurse’s office returned to silence.

  Ms. Hotta had probably stayed to watch over Haruyuki until he woke up, even after the meeting started. What a hassle for her. But, well, I guess it’s her job and all. Vague thoughts drifted through his mind, while a thin straw stretched out again from the left side of his face toward his mouth.

  He took it unconsciously and sucked. A nicely chilled sports drink poured pleasantly down his throat. Here, Haruyuki finally wondered curiously just what the straw was attached to and turned his gaze to the left. Maybe some automatic water-supply device? It couldn’t be a robotic nurse?

  But the straw extended from a completely uninteresting thermos. And holding the bottle was a pale, slender hand that did not belong to Haruyuki.

  As he gave commands to his still-decelerated thinking, his gaze now stopped on this hand. The slender arm extended from the sleeve of an open-collared black shirt. A dark-red ribbon on the chest of that shirt. Piano-black Neurolinker equipped on the graceful neck. Jet-black hair flowing over that.

  “Bwhaaah!”

  The instant he noticed the person sitting right next to the bed—the existence of whom he hadn’t even been aware of until that point—sports drink jetted forcefully from his mouth and nose. He watched a drop of liquid fly onto that black shirt, and immediately, his temperature and heart rate shot up.

  “I-I’m—” he shouted hoarsely, moving both hands in a panic. “I’m sorry! W-wi-wipe it off or it’ll st-st-stain—”

  “Mm. It will?” The person sitting on the simple folding chair set the thermos on the bed in a calm motion. “I’ll wipe it off, then.” She raised both hands and removed the hook-type ribbon before unbuttoning the open-collared shirt from the top.

  He saw the skin of her chest, impossibly pale, and even caught a glimpse of the top of the gently rising curve.

  “Hngoah!” Haruyuki uttered in a strange voice, throwing back his head, unable to close his eyes. But fortunately—or so he should say, at least—the two hands stopped their reckless movement.

  “Kidding. Don’t worry about it getting wet. The fabric’s a washable shape-memory polymer.” The person buttoning her shirt back up, her expression unmoved, was of course the only owner of a black uniform at Umesato Junior High, the student council vice president, Haruyuki’s parent Linker and Legion Master, Kuroyukihime.

  Seated with perfect posture on the chair, having returned her shirt to its original state, the beauty in black clothing opened her mouth once more, with a look on her face that allowed him to feel a faint tremor beyond its sternness. “Haruyuki. Ms. Hotta said this, too, and I won’t say that it’s bad to work as hard as you can in gym class. But given that you have the Neurolinker right there, you should heed the vitals warnings it sounds. This time, you managed to get away with a little light dehydration. But if things had taken a turn for the worse, this could have led to a serious incident.”

  “I—I know. I’m sorry. I accidentally got caught up in the game.” He had meant to fight hard, but the only result was that his classmates had laughed at him, and in the end, he’d collapsed duri
ng the game. And then news of that foolishness had spread even to Kuroyukihime. Haruyuki hung his head, but her pale right hand reached out to cover his left.

  “You don’t have to apologize. I’m not reproaching you. It’s simply…don’t make me worry too much.” Her voice dropped, and he raised his head. Kuroyukihime murmured, her expression more gentle, “When I heard from Chiyuri that you had collapsed, I thought I might pass out myself, you know. I just barely kept myself from using the forbidden physical acceleration command to race to the nurse’s office.”

  The forbidden command was the Physical Full Burst permitted only to level-nine Burst Linkers. It was treated as a higher level of the “Physical Burst” command that Haruyuki had almost used facing off against Ishio, but Physical Burst couldn’t begin to compare with Full Burst. That was because not only was consciousness accelerated, but movement of the physical body in the real world was also accelerated nearly a hundred times the normal speed.

  Of course, the price paid for this was nothing to scoff at. The user lost 99 percent of their accumulated burst points and was, in an instant, pushed to the brink of total loss. Kuroyukihime was likely joking, but even so, Haruyuki reflexively shook his head quickly back and forth.

  “I-I’m glad you didn’t use it. I didn’t really collapse, it was more like I was just too tired and got dizzy. So then Chiyu was the one who told you?”

  “Mm. At about the same time you were carried here. She’s quite fair in that way.”

  “F-fair?” When he cocked his head, not quite understanding what she meant, a faint, wry smile crossed Kuroyukihime’s lips, and she indicated her left side with her eyes.

  “Chiyuri and Takumu were sitting here with me for a while, until second period started. If they’d stayed, they would have been counted absent, so I sent them back to class. They were very worried. You should probably mail them.”

  “R-right.”

  Haruyuki nodded and launched the local net mailer from his virtual desktop. To his two childhood friends, he sent a report that he had regained consciousness and that there was nothing wrong with him, along with a brief thank-you for staying with him. And then he had an abrupt realization and looked at Kuroyukihime. “Um, is it okay for you not to go to class? Skipping without a note leaves a record on your permanent file, doesn’t—”