The Red Crest

by Reki Kawahara

  “Grar…” Unable to speak, because his mouth was clamped down on Crow’s right arm, Cerberus II groaned like an animal. But he apparently decided not to release his biting lock. It seemed that II had not inherited the brilliant fighting instincts of the polite first boy—Cerberus I.

  Once he had built up plenty of flight energy, Haruyuki stared at the black clouds above his head and kicked hard off the ground. A sudden fierce shock slammed into him as his left hand gripped his enemy’s right wrist and his imprisoned right arm stretched out below him. Given the relative weight of tungsten, Cerberus was fairly heavy for his small size, but not so heavy that Crow’s propulsive force couldn’t yank him up into the air.

  “Aaah…!” Haruyuki cried out once more and flapped his wings with everything he had. Cerberus peeled away from the dent in the road surface where he’d been half-buried moments before. They ascended rapidly, slicing through the pouring rain. Haruyuki flew at full speed, charging upstream along Nakano Sun Plaza, redeveloped and reborn as a skyscraper some ten years earlier, and windows shattered one after another from the shock wave.

  He flew up past the 180-meter-tall building, and after ascending another 50 meters, Haruyuki shifted into hovering mode. The very little remaining in Cerberus’s gauge would definitely be knocked out if he were dropped from this altitude.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the members of the Gallery—which had shifted to automatic Battle Follow mode—appearing on the roof of Sun Plaza as Haruyuki released his left hand. Cerberus II lurched to one side; now the only thing keeping his significant mass in midair was Haruyuki’s right arm, still caught in his mouth.

  “The previous you would have blocked my chance to fly at first glance. I was surprised that your insides changed as well, but I can’t really say you’re stronger than the other one.”

  “…Grrr…” Cerberus’s left shoulder growled at Haruyuki again, still biting down on his arm. The viselike pressure had stopped, fixing the distance between upper and lower fangs; the pain wasn’t so great that he couldn’t stand it.

  As for Cerberus, he couldn’t exactly bite off the arm in his mouth (although more precisely, it was in his left shoulder). The instant he did that, he would fall helplessly downward from an altitude of 230 meters. He might crash into the roof of a tall building rather than into the ground, and with the Physical Immune ability active, the terrain objects might have acted as a cushion, allowing him to live with 1 percent or so of his gauge. But Cerberus II, the personality in control now, did not appear to have that ability.

  Although the whole thing had sent a serious chill up his spine at first—the second personality in the shoulder armor, the force of the tungsten fangs’ biting attack—Haruyuki meant what he’d said. When he assessed the situation coolly, pre-switch Cerberus I was more troublesome than this II. Cerberus I was one of the least-compatible enemies Silver Crow had come across, but Crow was actually the natural enemy of Cerberus II, whose main weapon was a biting-hold technique. When II was yanked up from the ground to a high altitude the instant he bit down, the best he could hope for was a draw.

  Having finally gotten this far in his analysis and regaining a little mental leeway, Haruyuki turned toward the avatar dangling from his right arm, not even trying to move, and spoke once more: “…Who’s your parent?” He didn’t expect Cerberus to obediently offer up an answer, but he still had to ask.

  That day at lunch, during the special anti-Cerberus training session, Kuroyukihime and Fuko had told Haruyuki about two unfamiliar—and fearsome—ideas. The first was the “Mental-Scar Shell theory,” a mechanism for the birth of metal-color avatars espoused by the Quad Eyes Analyst, aka Argon Array, at the dawn of the Accelerated World.

  And the other was the “Artificial Metal-Color plan,” a plan to push the Mental-Scar Shell theory forward by intentionally producing metal colors…apparently. It wasn’t clear whether it had been implemented or not. But Kuroyukihime and Fuko seemed to think that Cerberus’s too-sudden appearance and his battle power, almost impossibly ferocious for a level one, was something other than coincidence. That was someone’s will at work.

  “Fight him and watch carefully,” Kuroyukihime had told Haruyuki.

  He had drawn one new characteristic out of Cerberus, but it wasn’t enough to be certain. Thus, he asked for the name of his parent. But, naturally, he got no verbal response.

  Instead, the mysterious metal color exerted a pressure several times anything he’d displayed so far on the tungsten fangs eating into Haruyuki’s arm.

  “Nngh…!” Haruyuki groaned again at the lancing pain.

  A disagreeable snap echoing in the air, Cerberus’s left shoulder closed completely. Silver Crow’s right arm was severed a little below the elbow, and the crimson damage effect dyed the raindrops around them the color of blood.

  Taking damage from losing a part, the health gauge on the upper left dropped dramatically. But with this, the duel was Haruyuki’s victory. Rather than be peppered with questions while dangling in space, Cerberus II had chosen to fall and drop the curtain on this fight.

  Haruyuki intended to watch his opponent’s resignation right to the end, and he shifted his gaze down from his gauge—

  “—?!”

  —and then gasped in amazement.

  Cerberus was not falling.

  To be more precise, he had dropped about two meters in altitude the moment he bit off Crow’s arm, but for some reason, he stopped there without falling any farther. Haruyuki wondered if Cerberus had hooked on to him with an ultrafine thread or something when he wasn’t looking, but if that were the case, Cerberus would have to have been directly below him. But his hovering enemy was off ahead of him by at least a meter.

  Haruyuki’s eyes, opened wide in shock, could not discern any reason why his enemy failed to fall. Instead, his ears caught an uncomfortable sound.

  Krrk. Rrk. Skrk. It was the sound of something hard being forcibly pulverized by something else. When he looked very, very carefully, the armor of Cerberus’s left shoulder was moving slightly up and down. That was the source of the sound—it was the grinding. He was chewing Silver Crow’s torn-off right arm.

  The dreadful sound stopped after mere seconds. But the next phenomenon was even more chilling.

  From Wolfram Cerberus’s back, ten thin, sharp protrusions—wings—started to slowly stretch out on both sides. They had the same shape as Silver Crow’s silver wings. But they were basically transparent, and the buildings around Nakano Station were hazily visible through them. It wasn’t that they were made of a glass-like material; they seemed to not actually be real, because the ceaseless pelting rain didn’t bounce off them.

  But even if they were phantom wings, they were generating definite thrust. As the transparent fins vibrated, Cerberus floated upward and ascended to the same altitude as Haruyuki before settling into a hover again. The cries of the Gallery, ensconced on the roof of the Nakano Sun Plaza building fifty meters below, reached them as if chasing after them.

  “H-he’s not falling! He’s floating!”

  “Cerberus can’t be a complete flying type, too, can he?!”

  “No way! He has that power on top of Physical Immune?!”

  These sounded very much like the cries Haruyuki had heard when he first flew in the Suginami area eight months earlier. He was frozen, unable to say anything.

  “Relax,” Cerberus said curtly, offhandedly. “My ability’s not stealing. Unlike him.”

  This statement contained some critical information, but his brain could not process this in the moment, and Haruyuki simply parroted back, “Not…stealing?”

  “Yeah. It’s Reproduction. Although even if it was stealing, you don’t really have the right to grumble about it. I mean, you took something important from me.”

  “You’re saying I took something from you?” Haruyuki asked, hoarsely, his mind finally 70 percent back online. The answer was something even more unexpected.

  “I can’t answer
your earlier question about who my parent is, but I’ll answer this one. I suppose you could call what you took from me my reason for existing.”

  “Reason…for existing…?”

  “Exactly. More than half my basic potential’s sealed away. I only have the one power, the Wolf Down I used before. Because I was tuned for a certain purpose.”

  “Tuned? …What’s this ‘purpose’?”

  “Simple. Equip that thing you sealed off somewhere. I say any more than that, and I’ll get yelled at. And we’re out of time anyway. I only ate half an arm, after all.”

  As Cerberus spoke, the wings on his back grew even more transparent. They lost form as if melting in the rain and turned into a hazy warping of space before finally disappearing. The gray avatar lurched forward. In the instant before he went into free fall, he tossed out his quiet final words.

  “We’ll meet again, Silver Crow. I’ll finish up here today…And a message from Number One. He says, ‘It was fun to duel with you. Honestly.’”

  And then the super-hard metal color, the source of many mysteries, fell to the ground, curtained by large drops of rain. A few seconds later, the thunderous roar of impact sounded, and the health gauge in the upper right dropped to zero.

  YOU WIN!!

  The flaming text burned brightly in the center of his field of view before the results screen was displayed, but Haruyuki remained frozen in midair, unable to move. In the depths of his ears, Cerberus’s speech from moments ago continued to play on repeat.

  Equip that thing you sealed off somewhere.

  That thing you sealed off.

  Haruyuki had an extremely clear gut feeling about what this signifier meant. But even in his head, he seriously hesitated to give it form.

  When the duel ended, the pounding rain of the stage turned into a drizzle, and the members of the Gallery applauded and cheered from the roof of Nakano Sun Plaza to send him off (although some of the voices sounded a little bewildered). But for a while, he wasn’t even aware of that.

  2

  Even after the acceleration was released and he returned to the back seat of the EV bus racing down Oume Highway, Haruyuki simply stared at his own right hand for a while. He had succeeded in getting his revenge, but any exhilaration at his victory had been blown off somewhere.

  Abruptly, he saw an index finger stretch out from his right and push the global-net disconnect button on the side of his Neurolinker. After the dialog box that popped up in his view to announce the loss of connection had disappeared, he saw Chiyuri’s face through his virtual desktop, eyebrows furrowed together.

  “Hey, Haru, what’re you all spaced out for? This is Nakano, y’know? If you don’t disconnect right after the duel, you’ll get challenged again.”

  “O-oh…Sorry, thanks…,” Haruyuki muttered, and his childhood friend changed the angle of her eyebrows, slightly cocking her head.

  “…What’s up? I mean, seriously. You won, but you look like you ate pickled eggplant or something.”

  His other childhood friend, Takumu, popped his face into Haruyuki’s view from around Chiyuri’s far side. “Once you pushed him to ten percent remaining, things seemed to take a fairly surprising turn,” he whispered. “Is that why, Haru?”

  And then Utai Shinomiya, sitting to Haruyuki’s left, tapped at her holo keyboard in midair. UI> IT LOOKED TO ME AS THOUGH YOUR DUEL OPPONENT CHANGED MIDWAY. SYSTEM-WISE, THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE, BUT…

  Haruyuki stared at the cherry-colored text in the ad hoc chat window sitting in the bottom of his field of view and then nodded deeply. Just loud enough for his friends in the back of the bus to hear, he offered, “It’s just like Shinomiya says. That’s what happened…I think. Cerberus also said he’d go home for today, so I’ll tell you the details once we get back to Suginami. Let’s change buses first.”

  They got off at the next stop, crossed the street at a nearby light, and got on a bus going the opposite way that came minutes later. Soon, they had crossed the border between Nakano and Suginami, and once the four had reconnected their Neurolinkers to the global net, they got off the bus at the Koenjirikkyo intersection. It was still raining, so they quickly opened their umbrellas.

  “So what are we doing?” Chiyuri asked. “Are we going to Haru’s?”

  Haruyuki thought for a minute. If they were going to talk about Brain Burst, then the usual spot of the Arita living room was without a doubt the safest, but his condo was on the other side of the Chuo Line elevated bridge, in the exact opposite direction from Utai’s house. He couldn’t bring himself to make a fourth-grade girl walk two kilometers round-trip in this rain. Even if she was wearing those adorable red boots. “Um, maybe if there’s somewhere around here we can talk first…”

  Once he had gotten that far, Chiyuri grinned. “Then it’s obviously Enjiya. The tatami rooms there are pretty secure, and Haru also promised to treat me and Taku.”

  “Gah! Treating you at Enjiya is a matter of national politics—”

  “Ah-ha-ha! Kidding! Kidding! Hold on a sec, I’ll just check.” After laughing for a moment, Chiyuri ran a finger across her virtual desktop. She was connecting with the shop online and getting information on the customer seating in real time. “Oh! We’re in luck! The inside room’s empty. I’ll reserve it.”

  She pushed a button that only she could see and swiped away the window. Bouncing up and down behind him, she shouted, “Hurry! Come on! The quick reservation there gets canceled after five minutes!”

  Enjiya was a café with Japanese-style sweets set up in a small storefront a little north of Oume Highway. The short noren curtains across the doorway were a deep red—enji—so it seemed natural to assume this was where the name came from. But it was actually a shortening of Koenji, a fact that only longtime regulars knew.

  The café was run by the owner, a man in his thirties or forties or fifties—in other words, a man of indeterminate age—and a woman who was probably in her twenties. While they did have traditional sweets, like the sweat bean paste of anmitsu and the jelly of mamekan, they also had over a dozen other types of treats, from gelato and waffles to homemade cheesecake and even enormous parfaits, so it was hard to decide whether to stick with the basics or go all out. Last fall, when Takumu and Haruyuki had gone to apologize for the backdoor hacking incident, Chiyuri had insisted on all the parfaits she could eat at this café as a condition of peace and had nearly broken both of their banks, a memory that was both sad and sweet now.

  Perhaps she herself had long forgotten this—or perhaps she was merely pretending to have forgotten, for their sakes—but the instant she set herself down on a floor cushion in their reserved tatami room in back, she cried out, utterly carefree and without so much as glancing at the holo menu, “Let’s see! I’m having the kinako parfait with rice dumplings topped with sweet bean paste!”

  “Are you sure you wanna eat something like that right before supper?” Haruyuki remarked unthinkingly, and he got a chuckle in return.

  “I’ll thank you not to look down on athletes. My metabolism’s different from yours, you know.”

  “I-I’m sorry. Um, I’m gonna have fresh chocolate gelato with nuts on top.”

  “Whenever we come here, that’s all you ever order, Haru.” This time, it was Takumu who chuckled at him. “I’ll go with…mamekan.”

  Haruyuki turned his face away—“Whatever, I like it”—and locked eyes with Utai, who was grinning at this little back-and-forth among the three childhood friends. The instant he saw her sitting in the seiza position on her own cushion—back straight, knees tucked under her—memories of the day before flashed through his mind.

  After they had finished their club work, Utai had invited him to the Shinomiya house, where she had sat in the same formal position and told him about the world of Noh she had been born into and about the sad fate of Mirror Masker, the Burst Linker who had been her older brother and also her parent.

  Perhaps intuiting his thoughts from the momentary look on his face, Utai smiled broa
dly and quickly typed, UI> I’VE NEVER BEEN TO THIS CAFé BEFORE. DO YOU HAVE ANY RECOMMENDATIONS?

  Looking at the text displayed in the chat window, Haruyuki was more concerned with Utai’s self-possession, which was so unlike a fourth grader, than the content of her question. When he really thought about it, a rich girls’ school like Matsunogi likely prohibited its students from stopping to eat or drink on their way home. And yet Utai was calm and relaxed in this café, a place she was visiting for the first time, probably because even at that age, she was used to getting food and groceries by herself.

  He had only learned of Utai’s home environment for the first time the previous day, and the details started to resurface in the back of his mind, but he pushed them away for now and grinned. “Um. If it’s your first time, then I guess maybe the anmitsu?”

  Chiyuri was quick to agree. “Anmitsu’s the foundation of a Japanese-style sweetshop!”

  UI> FOUNDATIONS ARE IMPORTANT. WELL THEN, I’LL HAVE THIS FRUIT ANMITSU. Utai touched the holo menu with a small finger and pushed the COMPLETE ORDER button.

  A female employee appeared in Japanese-style clothing with a tray of waters and hand towels. She greeted Haruyuki and his friends amiably (they had been frequenting the place for more than five years now) and then welcomed the newcomer Utai more formally before returning to the kitchen.

  The students in the neighborhood whispered that the Japanese-style desserts were prepared by the owner, while the Western-style ones were made by the female employee—they also whispered the converse. But the truth of it was unknown. There were also rumors that a robot pâtissier had been spotted in the kitchen and that the café’s sweets were all lies delivered to their brains via Neurolinker, but these were clearly jokes.

  What was certain was that the uniform of the woman—a deep-red kimono with a snowy white apron—and her twenties-ish appearance had not changed in the slightest.