The Red Crest

by Reki Kawahara

  “W-well, you might be right…”

  “And if you get Theoretical Mirror, it won’t just be Enemies; you’ll have a hundred-percent resistance to the light attacks of other Burst Linkers, too, right? There are kind of a lot of red types with lasers. You’ll be able to use it all the time in the Territories. Don’t get depressed. Let’s get right to your training. I mean, I went to all the trouble of finding you an Enemy.”

  “Y-yeah, you’re right. If I manage to get it today, Kuroyukihime and Master will both be surprised—I just know it. Okay! I’m gonna do it!” Haruyuki clenched his left hand into a fist—his right was holding Chiyuri. He felt like he heard a sigh near his ear, but he ignored it and started moving forward.

  At first, the Enemy was nothing but a tiny silhouette, but as they got closer, its shape became apparent: an armadillo with a huge head. Covered in hard armor, the body was round, and the four legs were short. The forehead of its tapered head was excessively large, with an elliptical red gem, or maybe a lens, embedded in it. It moved its pointed snout from side to side, apparently looking for the source of the sound that had beckoned it to this place.

  “You can see the red jewel in its forehead, right? It shoots lasers from there. I was far away, so I didn’t take a direct hit, but it pierced the buildings of the Ancient Castle stage, so don’t let your guard down, okay?”

  “…The Ancient Castle buildings are pretty hard…”

  “It’s fine. You’ll be fine. As long as you don’t die instantly, I can heal you with Citron Call. Its aggro range is about thirty meters, so descend right before that.”

  “…R-roger.” Haruyuki nodded and started to swoop so that he would land with room to spare, fifty meters in front of the armadillo Enemy. Since the Enemy was standing still in the middle of a large space that seemed to have originally been the university sports grounds, approaching it was easy.

  The floor of the Sacred Ground stage was covered in tiles with a lovely arabesque pattern. Its opposite, the Deadly Sin stage, was also laid with white tiles, but blood-like fluid oozed from the joints of the lattice pattern in that stage, while these tiles were the very definition of purity. The friction coefficient was also just right; there was no fear of your feet slipping.

  Thus, Haruyuki and Chiyuri landed fifty meters away, their eyes fixed on the Enemy ahead. However, the bottoms of their feet did not communicate the sharp hardness of tile, but rather something wet and mucusy.

  “Whoa!”

  “Aah!”

  Crying out, the pair tumbled backward at the same time. Half-immersed in the sticky fluid, they stiffened up in tandem, too. In the Accelerated World, liquid on the ground generally caused serious issues, and so any liquid a Burst Linker encountered had to be dealt with immediately. Haruyuki first looked at the health gauge in the upper left of his field of view, but fortunately, it didn’t appear to have dropped by even a pixel. Which meant that rather than being poison or a corrosive fluid, this was some adhesive liquid.

  With that thought, he threw his upper body upward, again at the same time as Chiyuri. But their backs easily peeled away from the ground.

  So then what was this sticky stuff? He dropped his gaze and saw that they were sitting in a brown pool about four meters in diameter. Ever so tentatively, he raised his left hand, but the liquid dripped off, seeming to leave his metallic armor unchanged.

  “…What is this…?” Haruyuki cocked his head.

  Chiyuri raised her right hand to bring the viscous brown liquid to her face. “Huh. No way. Is this maybe…” Muttering, she lifted her face and turned to Haruyuki. “Haru—I mean, Crow, open your mouth,” she commanded.

  “Huh?”

  “Hurry! Aaah!”

  He did as he was told and ran a finger from the bottom of his helmet to the top. His mirrored visor slid up a quarter of the way, revealing the hidden mouth of his avatar’s exposed body. He had no sooner popped this open than Lime Bell’s index and middle fingers—dripping with plenty of the brown sticky stuff—were thrust into his mouth.

  “M-mnghaamph!” Naturally, he cried out at this sudden assault, but she didn’t take her fingers out. Fluid was forced into his mouth, and the taste of it spread unbidden across Haruyuki’s palate. Slightly bitter, with body. And sweet. More than sweet; it was terribly delicious.

  When he grew still, Chiyuri yanked her fingers out. “What’s it taste like?”

  “…Chocolate…”

  “I knew it.”

  So then taste it yourself! he wanted to shout, but the urge was circumvented by a massive question mark popping up in his brain.

  Why? Why would there be a pool of chocolate on the ground—and sweet milk chocolate to boot, Haruyuki’s favorite kind? This wasn’t an attribute of the Sacred Ground stage. Or had they mistakenly assumed this was Sacred Ground when it was actually a Sweet stage or something?

  Sitting there dumbfounded, he wrestled with whether or not to try having another taste when—

  “Puppet Make!!”

  The adorable voice of a girl rang out through the field. There was no doubt this was a special technique call—the voice command a Burst Linker shouted to activate a special attack. And if he was hearing one of those, then the basic idea was that something, at any rate, was about to happen.

  Haruyuki quickly grabbed ahold of Chiyuri’s torso again and fiercely flapped the wings on his back. As they rose up, he dashed backward about three meters and once again checked their surroundings—or he was going to check their surroundings, until what happened next stole his attention. From the pool of chocolate before them, splrp!—two human-shaped figures rose up.

  “No way! It’s totally not deep enough for an avatar to dive in there!”

  Chiyuri was exactly right.

  But the fact was that two 150-centimeter silhouettes stood before their eyes. Their forms were very simple: heads smooth and round, with arms, legs, and body all clearly visible. They had no eyes or mouths; instead, each of their faces bore only a single flowerlike mark. They were a semiglossy dark brown—the same chocolate color as the pond they’d leapt out of.

  The avatars had no particular characteristics to speak of, but one feature they shared was unique to them: The pair, standing side by side, had the same external appearance. But in the Accelerated World, it was fundamentally not possible for multiple avatars to have exactly the same design. Even the senior members of the Blue Legion, Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade—rumored to be twins—had slightly different colors and part shapes.

  “Wh-what on earth—?!” Haruyuki shouted at the same time as the two avatars charged silently forward.

  Without even the time to notice that the chocolate pool spreading out at the feet of the avatars had disappeared, Haruyuki and Chiyuri reflexively leapt into counterattack formation. Silver Crow launched a sharp left strike, and Lime Bell cast her Choir Chime, at the chests of their respective opponents.

  Instead of the impact of his sharp fingers shooting through hard armor, Haruyuki felt something wet and soft, like he had plunged his hand into a lump of modeling clay. His strike dug deeply into the chest of the faceless avatar and continued out through their back. With the one blow, the torso was split in half, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if their health gauge dropped over 50 percent. After taking an injury on this level in the Unlimited Neutral Field, they wouldn’t be able to move for a while because of the pain dancing through their nervous system—twice the pain experienced in a normal duel field.

  They shouldn’t have been able to, anyway.

  “Wha—?” His left hand still following through on the blow, Haruyuki opened his eyes wide.

  The faceless avatar only staggered very briefly and then, without a single cry, countered with a right straight. The punch hit Haruyuki hard on the left side of his helmet, whisking away 5 percent of Crow’s health gauge in one shot.

  Throwing himself back to avoid a follow-up attack, Haruyuki glanced over to check on Chiyuri. She, too, had knocked the faceless body fl
ying with a strike from her handbell. But that didn’t stop her enemy, either. With a large hole in its body, the avatar shot off a right roundhouse kick. Chiyuri blocked it with her left arm. At the same time, she jumped and bounced over to Haruyuki’s side.

  “What the—?! These guys are weird!” Chiyuri shouted, and Haruyuki bobbed his head in agreement.

  And then they witnessed something abnormal that went far beyond weird.

  Although both of the faceless avatars had taken serious damage to their bodies, the areas around their wounds suddenly melted, becoming a dark-brown liquid to fill in the holes. In just a few seconds, the bodies of the no-faces were completely restored, taking on their original smooth, dark-brown surface.

  “So striking and hitting have no effect,” Haruyuki groaned.

  “To begin with”—Chiyuri cocked her head slightly—“are they really Burst Linkers? Their armor seems sort of made, like—to be honest, like chocolate, I mean…”

  “Oh, yeah. And the chocolate pool from before is gone. If these two are dolls made from that chocolate…Maybe we could find out if we took a bite?”

  “You just had chocolate ice cream!” Chiyuri retorted, and in that instant the faceless avatars who had been steadily closing the distance between them stiffened awkwardly. Or so Haruyuki felt. They actually started to retreat, and he gradually stepped forward after them.

  Unfortunately, however, he didn’t get the chance to taste the chocolate-color avatars. Before he caught up with them, the girl from before spoke again.

  “Figuring out the weak point of my Chocopets so quickly! You’re not so bad at this, hmm!”

  The source of the very slightly nasal, sweet voice was not the no-faces before their eyes. Haruyuki and Chiyuri quickly looked over to their left and saw a tiny silhouette standing on the roof of a small temple about twenty meters away.

  She was smaller than the faceless avatars. Her armor was a similar semiglossy chocolate color, but her shape was different. From the long hair coming out on both sides from beneath a hat with a large brim and the large skirt-type armor covering her lower half, she was clearly a female-type avatar. Her eye lenses shone a clear pink.

  The instant he saw her, Haruyuki was certain of two things. First, that this F-type was, this time, for sure a real Burst Linker. Second, that the two faceless avatars were combat dolls created with her power. The “puppet make” command they’d heard at the start of the offensive was probably a special attack that created dolls.

  He had all kinds of other questions—for instance, what was a Chocopet?—but he put them aside for now and asked the one he had to ask before all others. “Why are you attacking us?! You…Are you a member of the Acceleration Research Society?!”

  The chocolate F-type avatar blinked with surprise and then stamped a high-heeled foot down on the roof of the temple. “I belong to the Dessert Lovers’ Society! And you! Playing dumb despite the fact that you came here to hunt Coolu! As long as my eyes are the color of strawberry cream, I absolutely will not allow you to do that!”

  And there’s another weird word. He searched the index in his brain, but he found nothing about a person called “Coolu,” so he tried to confirm.

  “Um. Who’s Coolu?”

  “It’s pointless to feign innocence! I was witness to your attempted attack on little Coolu over there!” Her slender left hand snapped up and pointed to the center of the plaza.

  Shifting his gaze, he saw the small armadillo-like Enemy sniffing just like it had been before. “Huh? The Enemy? That’s ‘little Coolu’?”

  “She is! The species name is Lava Carbuncle—Coolu for short. She’s my friend! I’ll stand and lose all my points right here and now before I’d allow you to go ahead and hunt my poor baby!” Turning her left hand on Haruyuki and Chiyuri, the chocolate avatar continued boldly. “Now you’d better hurry up and use them! Those filthy…ISS kits!”

  4

  “Cocoa Fountain.”

  The small, chocolate-colored avatar uttered the technique name in almost a murmur, and a glittering pink light shot from the tips of her fingers.

  The light carved out a parabola and fell to the ground. There, with a burbling sound, the same dark-brown liquid Haruyuki and Chiyuri had slipped in before—milk chocolate—came gushing up. Instantly, the lesser-class Enemy Lava Carbuncle, aka Little Coolu, started moving toward them at a trot and sniffed at the chocolate pond before plunging its tapered snout in and lapping it up.

  “She’s in the Enemy’s aggro range, isn’t she?” Chiyuri said quietly, and Haruyuki nodded.

  The chocolate avatar was standing a mere three meters away from the Enemy now. No matter how slow and sluggish the Enemy, it would definitely attack at this close range. Haruyuki and Chiyuri had given themselves a margin of error and kept a distance of forty meters between themselves and it, but even so, they couldn’t say for sure that they were at a safe range.

  “So maybe it’s been tamed?” Haruyuki wondered.

  “But, I mean, don’t you need a special item for that? Reins or something, like Kuroyukihime used to tame that flying horse?”

  “I thought so, too. But, well, I guess there are a fair number of exceptions to the rule in the Accelerated World.”

  While they stood next to each other discussing the issue, the chocolate avatar turned her back to the Enemy, who was lapping up its treat in a trance, and marched toward them. The two chocolate puppets—Chocopets for short—that she had generated from the first chocolate pond had already disappeared, the technique having expired its effective time.

  The avatar that stopped in front of Haruyuki and Chiyuri, wordlessly turning her eyes on them, was relatively small for an F-type. She wasn’t much different in size from Utai Shinomiya’s Ardor Maiden.

  “I’ll introduce myself first. Chocolat Puppeteer…I do not currently belong to any Legion.”

  “Oh!” At the abrupt self-introduction, Haruyuki hurriedly bowed his head. “Um, I’m Silver Crow. My Legion’s Nega Nebulus.”

  “I’m also a member of Nega Nebulus—Lime Bell.”

  Once they had given their names, the small female avatar, who apparently went by Chocolat Puppeteer, traced her cheek with a slim finger and nodded sharply. “I see. So you’re the famed Corvus of the Black Legion. And the Watch Witch.”

  “Is that your nickname?” Haruyuki asked in a quiet voice.

  “I—I don’t know!” Chiyuri’s cheeks reddened slightly as she shook her head. “Anyway, focus on the conversation!”

  “R-right.”

  Fortunately, Chocolat Puppeteer had fallen into a brief moment of thought. When she lifted her head, she nodded once more. “I understand that you are not ISS kit users. And that you did not come to hunt Coolu.”

  “Th-thanks.” Haruyuki let out a sigh of relief before continuing in a more composed tone. “So is it maybe okay if we ask you a question, too?”

  “Go ahead. Please.”

  “When did you dive here?”

  It was clear that Chocolat was lying in ambush for Burst Linkers who came to hunt Coolu, aka Lava Carbuncle. But an ambush in the Unlimited Neutral Field was no simple thing. Or rather, an ambush was basically impossible without knowing the dive time of your target up to the very second.

  Chocolat shrugged lightly. “I’m pretty sure it was ten—no, eleven days ago. Although it was a mere sixteen minutes ago in real time.”

  “E-eleven days?!” Haruyuki and Chiyuri cried out together.

  The small chocolate avatar’s mouth cracked into a slight smile. “It hasn’t been boring in the slightest. I’ve been with Coolu the whole time. And…I don’t care if ten days turns into ten months. I mentioned this to you before, but I’m prepared to give up all my points on this dive.”

  “…”

  Haruyuki and Chiyuri unconsciously looked at each other. Losing all your Burst Points was the same as a forced uninstall of the Brain Burst program—that is, death as a Burst Linker. Too heavy a thing to say with a smile on your lips.


  “Um. So what you’re saying then is that you won’t step back from protecting this Enemy—I mean, Coolu—even if it means losing all your points. Is that maybe it?” Haruyuki asked timidly.

  “That is what I’m saying.” Chocolat nodded, moving her bonnet-type hat calmly up and down.

  “But— That— Maybe this is the wrong way to say this, but no matter how many times an Enemy’s hunted, they’re restored once the Change comes, right?”

  “That is indeed true. But the Enemy that is restored is at best one of the same species; it’s not as though the exact same individual is regenerated. The next Lava Carbuncle to pop up in this place will probably attack me the second I approach it.” Her voice shook a little at the end, and Chocolat hid her face under the brim of her hat.

  Lime Bell—with a totally different armor color, but a similar hat and an overall form that resembled the other avatar somehow—took a step forward. “How long did it take for you to get so close to this baby?” she asked, gently.

  “…In real time, a little over two years.”

  “It did? So then you’re really friends now, huh? I get how you feel. I mean, if I made such a cute friend, I’d definitely want to protect them.”

  “…”

  Chocolat Puppeteer lifted her head slightly and looked at Lime Bell. “Do you really feel that way?” she asked quietly.

  “Of course!”

  “M-me too.” While Chiyuri was emphatic, Haruyuki was timid in his assent.

  “So, then…” Chocolat smiled once more, somehow sadly. “What if the one trying to hunt that friend was also a friend? And a Burst Linker who had been a comrade in the same Legion only three days before? What would you do?”

  Legion: Petit Paquet; members: three.

  The members had discussed and decided on the Legion name, which means “small package” in French, Chocolat Puppeteer told Haruyuki and Chiyuri in a subdued voice.