The Binary Stars of Destiny

by Reki Kawahara

  “Now, just who do you think I am? I submitted confirmation that I’m a health aide, naturally. Ms. Hotta signed it for me easily enough.” She grinned as she delivered this line, and he could only feel sorry for how completely thoughtless his question had been.

  Kuroyukihime changed the nuance of her smile slightly before leaning forward. “To reward Chiyuri’s sense of fair play, I did consider issuing an aide pass for her as well, but she understood my selfishness,” she whispered mischievously. “After all, just yesterday, I used some tricks so we could be alone in the student council office, but we couldn’t really have a real conversation. Well, given the situation, that was unavoidable.”

  “Oh. Uh. Yehuh.” At the shining, unutterable beauty of those black eyes this close up, Haruyuki unconsciously turned away.

  At lunch the previous day, Kuroyukihime had suddenly burst into eighth grade’s class C and shouted that she was requesting the immediate presence of the president of the Animal Care Club. Having been appointed to that very position after announcing his candidacy through a misunderstanding, Haruyuki had followed her to the student council office, bracing himself to be yelled at for some reason or another, when it turned out it was all simply an excuse for the two of them to be alone together.

  Of course, Haruyuki was also happy to talk with Kuroyukihime alone—it was, in fact, a dreamlike experience beyond happiness.

  But she was too impressive and important to him. It wasn’t just that she was his parent as a Burst Linker and his Legion Master. She had saved his life, pulled him free of the bog, and given him hope. The sword master he had sworn his absolute and eternal loyalty to. And that didn’t even begin to describe what she was to him. Perhaps there was just one word that could sum her up: miracle.

  Kuroyukihime lived charging single-mindedly toward the distant stars, and although she had her own issues to deal with, she had set her eyes on someone like Haruyuki, spoken to him, and reached out to him; this could well be called a miracle. Now she was at the center of his world, a massive jewel glittering dazzlingly. She was too beautiful, to the point where he felt she might disappear if he touched her, nothing but a fleeting memory.

  He had only recently been able to relax around her enough to the point that he could speak normally, but when he realized they were alone together in a closed room, his heart started to pound, and his breathing became shallow. The current situation was much more critical than the day before in the student council office. After all, they were neatly surrounded by thick white curtains on all sides, and Haruyuki was lying in bed, with Kuroyukihime pushing a hand over the edge of it, leaning forward and staring at him.

  His thoughts threatened to shoot off into some inexcusable territory if he stayed silent, so Haruyuki forced himself to pull back on the joystick and restart the conversation. “Uh, I’m sorry about yesterday. Now that I think about it, I didn’t actually explain the situation to you.”

  “Mm. Well, I got the gist of it from your mail. And I did want you to tell me the details, but then you ended up here, and it all flew completely out of my head.”

  “I-I’m sorry.” He apologized for the second time in a row, rubbing the fingertips of both hands together.

  The reason Haruyuki had raced out of the school and run home the day before was because of his fear for Takumu, of course. And instead of that fear being absolutely unfounded, Haruyuki had discovered his best friend was on the verge of falling completely under the control of the ISS kit. But through a duel with Haruyuki, Takumu had gotten himself back, and the kit itself had been completely destroyed in the fight in the BB central server the night before.

  Although he had given Kuroyukihime, Fuko Kurasaki, and Utai Shinomiya a rough overview of all this in a mail after his duel with Ash Roller that morning, he hadn’t been able to include all the little details in its short message. Haruyuki himself didn’t fully understand the events in the central server, and another, more important matter had been added to his list of things to do before the mission to escape the Castle commenced.

  To wit, Ash Roller’s entirely unexpected “wish.”

  Even though he should have had a million things to say to Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki closed his mouth once more, unable to figure out exactly where to start.

  “Even still, that you would try so hard in gym class that you’d collapse…,” Kuroyukihime said gently, as if she understood Haruyuki’s confusion and was trying to ease it to some degree. “Perhaps this might sound rude, but it’s a little unexpected.”

  “Y-yeah. I was super surprised, too.”

  “Did something change for you?”

  At this question, he cocked his head, puzzled. Now that she was asking, he did feel like there was something, but at the same time, he felt like nothing at all had changed.

  “Umm. It’s not that anything particular happened. But I was messing up all over the place in the game, and Taku came and said to me that the important thing was the image. So I decided to at least stop playing the game with a negative image in my head. And then I guess I just got into it before I knew it. That reminds me, I wonder how the game ended.”

  “Takumu said you lost by one point.”

  “We…did?”

  According to his hazy memory, Haruyuki’s team had been down three points with a minute or two left on the clock and opposing ace Ishio going on a serious offensive against them. If they had narrowed that down to a one-point difference, then they had blocked that swift offensive attack and managed to score on the rebound, which is where the game ended. He figured Takumu managed to pull that off with some shocking counterattack.

  And then Kuroyukihime made a surprising statement, smile on her lips. “The truth is, it was Takumu and one other boy, the basketball player in your class, who carried you to the nurse’s office.”

  “Huh? Ishio? Carried me?”

  “Mm. He left a message for you. He said, ‘You crushed me this time, but that trick won’t work on me again next time.’”

  “Ah! Cr-crushed?! But I mean, his team won the game.”

  “Apparently, his own personal definition of winning is that it’s a loss unless he wins with a twenty-point difference.”

  “H-huh, really?” He couldn’t tell if this message from Ishio was humility or arrogance, and unconsciously, he smiled wryly.

  The reason he had been able to stay in Ishio’s way during the game was because the opposing team stubbornly refused to change their strategy. If they played basketball in gym class and he ended up against Ishio again, the simple method of using the AR display to block him would no longer work. It was the same as in Brain Burst duels or the Territories. In that world, too, succeeding a second time with a strategy that worked once was very rare. Because it wasn’t an AI he was fighting, it was a human being with his own image power.

  His thoughts drifting along that thread, Haruyuki was abruptly aware of the important “something” he had felt during the game starting to flicker back to life in his mind. “Oh!”

  “Mm? What is it?”

  “Oh no. It’s no big deal. I mean, I might be way off, but…” Pushed by Kuroyukihime’s gaze wordlessly encouraging him, Haruyuki moved his mouth again before it came to a complete halt. “…‘An image strongly projected from the consciousness…overcomes restraints and becomes real.’”

  Kuroyukihime’s eyes opened wide for an instant, and then she smiled gently. “It had to have been Fuko who said that to you.”

  “Th-that’s right. How did you know?”

  “I told you before. She is the most genuine user of the positive will I know. And those words are very Fuko, and her belief in the light side of the Incarnate System above all else.”

  Haruyuki didn’t think he completely understood the meaning behind Kuroyukihime’s soft words. But not daring to ask her about it, he continued speaking himself. “That’s obviously a description of the Incarnate System in the Accelerated World. But when Takumu said that to me about one’s ‘image’ being important during the game, I
just somehow thought, like, maybe when we really try hard in this real world…we’re doing the same thing? Of course, it’s not like we can use superpowers like Incarnate attacks on this side. But, like, my going up against the Ishio in a basketball game or managing to clean the animal hutch by myself, it’s a miracle greater than superpowers for me. Umm, basically, I guess I’m trying to say…um…”

  Here, Haruyuki reached the limit of his power of speech, and all he could do was flap his mouth open and shut like always.

  Fortunately, however, it looked like he had communicated what he needed to say to Kuroyukihime. Her obsidian eyes opened wide once more, and a long breath slipped past her glossy lips. “Haruyuki. When exactly will you stop surprising me? I certainly never dreamed you would reach this mental state so quickly, and under your own power at that.”

  “Huh? M-mental state?” Haruyuki parroted back, dumbfounded.

  “Yes.” Kuroyukihime peered into his eyes and nodded deeply. “The words you’ve just given voice to are precisely the entrance to the second stage of the Incarnate System. To move past the basic expansions of range, power, defense, and movement and learn the so-called practical techniques, you must understand exactly what the imagination is not through reason, but rather through intuition. Just how big, how deep this power given to us is, this power to imagine.”

  “Im…agine…”

  “Mm. Up to now, you thought the overwriting through the image that is the basis of the Incarnate System was a game system logic that existed only in the virtual world, yes? But that’s incorrect. Imagination holds unlimited power in this real world as well. Of course, you can’t do anything that would defy the laws of physics. But drawing on the aid of the power of the image, it is possible to overwrite a wall that appears to be an absolute limit. Just as you yourself proved during the basketball game.”

  Kuroyukihime’s words shook Haruyuki somewhere deep in his heart, but at the same time, they also generated a serious confusion in him. He unconsciously leaned forward and, staring at Kuroyukihime—who similarly leaned forward—he asked in a hoarse voice, “The power of imaging takes you beyond your limits. That fundamental is the same in the Accelerated World and the real world. I feel like I basically get that. But how are that and this ‘second stage of the Incarnate System’ connected?”

  Kuroyukihime didn’t respond to his question right away. She lowered her eyes, as if seized by uncertainty after having come this far, and bit her lip lightly.

  Haruyuki had the vague sense that he could guess at why. Kuroyukihime carried a kind of fear about the Incarnate power she had learned. She feared that her power—unlike the positive power Fuko/Sky Raker used—was negative, calling up destruction and despair.

  But Haruyuki fervently believed that couldn’t be true. Because Kuroyukihime’s Incarnate attacks (though he had seen only her long-range attack, Vorpal Strike) were so beautiful as to render him speechless. Even if it was awesomely powerful, a technique that beautiful couldn’t be the result of negative imaging.

  “Kuroyukihime.” Haruyuki leaned a few centimeters closer and gently touched her right hand with his left. “First, Raker, and Niko after her, taught me very important things about the Incarnate System. But…you’re my ‘parent.’ I want to know everything about you. I want you to teach me everything. Please. Please tell me about your Incarnate.”

  Her reply wasn’t quick in coming.

  The sun at half past ten on that June morning had already risen to very close to the center of the sky, and the light coming in through the windows didn’t reach the corner on the other side of the nurse’s office. In the space cut out by the snowy white curtains on all four sides of his bed, dimly illuminated by the lowered light of the ceiling panel, only the sound of the two of them breathing echoed faintly.

  Finally, Kuroyukihime’s fingers moved gently to tangle themselves among Haruyuki’s. A subdued murmur followed. “In that case, we’ll first need a direct cable.” As she lifted her face, the only thing he saw there was the same enigmatic, mysterious smile as always.

  Haruyuki let out his breath and then said, panicking slightly, “Ah! I-I’m sorry! My cable’s in my bag in the classroom.”

  “Mine, too. But they have cables here.” As she spoke, Kuroyukihime manipulated her virtual desktop with a light touch, likely searching the equipment list. She nodded soon enough, removed her fingers from Haruyuki’s hand, stood up, and disappeared quietly beyond the curtain.

  He could hear the sound of a drawer opening and closing, and when she returned seconds later, her hand held a white XSB cable. But…

  “I-isn’t that a little short?” Haruyuki blurted the instant he saw the cable, which looked to be just barely fifty centimeters long.

  But Kuroyukihime shrugged lightly. “Then we just have to make it reach. Fortunately, we’re out of view of the social cameras here.”

  “Huh? B-but how—?” he started to say, and then swallowed his words hard.

  Because Kuroyukihime hopped up onto the bed, entirely nonchalantly.

  “Huh?! Um! That’s…” Belatedly, he realized he was still wearing his white gym clothes and pulled back. Thanks to the quick-drying fabric, his sweat had already dried, but he must have still stunk.

  But Kuroyukihime reached out her left hand, seeming to pay all this no mind, and pushed gently on Haruyuki’s chest to make him lie back down before lying down herself immediately to his right. From extremely close up, she turned a somewhat mischievous smile on him.

  As usual, the engine of his mind raced emptily while his heart rate shot up into the red zone.

  Her sigh contained a smile as it gently touched his ear. “Ha-ha! After everything, it’s a bit late to get this nervous now. We did sleep together in the same bed the night of the Hermes’ Cord race, didn’t we?”

  “Y—! Yee—! W-w-w-w-we did, but!”

  The aforementioned race event had happened a mere two weeks earlier in the Accelerated World, but because so many things had happened since then, it seemed like something out of the distant past. But the memory of that night was deeply etched into the back of Haruyuki’s mind.

  Then, too, they had direct-dueled from the same bed. Although Haruyuki had challenged Kuroyukihime over and over again with his recently acquired Aerial Combo, she had fended off his attacks effortlessly with her ever-more-powerful “way of the flexible,” and in the end, he had taken a hit from her level-eight technique Death By Embracing and been killed instantly.

  I have a feeling it’s gonna turn into something like that this time, too, Haruyuki thought as the girl brought the end of the fifty-centimeter-short XSB cable toward his Neurolinker. Reflexively, he started to move his head away, but the plug was inserted whether he liked it or not.

  “Ah!”

  Not heeding Haruyuki’s strangled cry, Kuroyukihime next connected the plug on the opposite end to the piano-black communication device equipped around her slender neck. A wired connection warning blinked red in his view.

  “Yesterday, I made you use a point for my own selfishness. So today, how about I treat you?” Those whispered words meant that rather than both of them accelerating simultaneously to dive into the initial blue world, Kuroyukihime alone would accelerate and then challenge Haruyuki.

  “O-okay. Thanks,” Haruyuki replied.

  He watched her light-peach-colored lips move slightly to call out, “Burst Link.”

  And then the dry thunder of acceleration filled his hearing.

  7

  That day, the setting for their second duel was a Steel stage, every inch of the landscape formed with riveted steel panels. As for the characteristics of the stage, to begin with, it was hard. It conducted electricity well. And footsteps were abnormally loud. Even more so when the duel avatar was a metal color, metallic down to the soles of their feet.

  Clang! came the high-pitched metallic impact as Haruyuki dropped down onto the stage and waited for the sound of two more feet, head lowered. However, he heard nothing even after a few seconds
had passed, so he lifted his face and surveyed his surroundings.

  What was originally the Umesato Junior High nurse’s office had changed into an empty cube, no beds, no desk. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all thick panels of steel shining a sharp rusted color. In line with Brain Burst’s starting-distance rule—which stated that opponents who were basically on top of each other in the real world should appear separated by a minimum of ten meters in the Accelerated World—she stood quietly at the room’s eastern wall.

  Sleek, semitransparent jet-black armor, reminiscent of obsidian. Armor skirt patterned after water lilies, incredibly slender body, mask that tapered into a V. And the long, sharp swords of all four limbs that sent a chill up the spine…

  Haruyuki took in the beautiful yet ferocious figure of the Black King, Black Lotus, a sight he would never grow accustomed to no matter how many times he saw it, and finally understood why he hadn’t heard any footfalls. The sharply tapered points of her feet floated above the floor, albeit by only a centimeter or so. She was one of the few hovering avatars in the Accelerated World.

  Kuroyukihime stayed like that a few more seconds, staring at Haruyuki’s avatar, Silver Crow, but eventually, she moved forward as if gliding. She paused before him, and the violet-blue eyes on the other side of her black mirrored goggles shone vibrantly.

  “I can tell by just looking at you, Haruyuki. You made it through yet another fierce battle.”

  He quickly guessed that the words and their gentle echo were referring to the intense fight between him and Takumu the evening before. He still hadn’t explained to Kuroyukihime all the details of the previous night through to that morning, but she had apparently already seen through to the fact that he and Takumu had spoken fist to fist as Burst Linkers.