The Red Crest

by Reki Kawahara

  “It’s okay. I’ll make sure to keep watch, so you two just rest now, while you can,” Haruyuki said.

  Chiyuri and Chocolat next to her blinked their eye lenses in surprise and then, for some reason, giggled at the same time.

  “Wh-what are you laughing for?”

  “It’s just, like—you’re saying stuff that just doesn’t suit you.”

  “You are putting on airs a little.”

  “Tch…” Unconsciously, he hung his head and then hurriedly brought his gaze back up.

  They were standing by in the middle of the university grounds where Haruyuki and Chiyuri had first encountered Lava Carbuncle. Coolu, the Enemy in question, had withdrawn to a midsize temple it used as a nest. In the real world, the building was apparently the university co-op store, where they sold all kinds of sweets. (Although Haruyuki didn’t think this had any connection with that.)

  A large school building rose up on the northern side of the grounds, while Coolu’s nest was on the east side, so it was the south and west sides that were open. If the ISS kit users were going to come at them, it would be from one of those directions. Haruyuki glared that way, but he also had one more important clue as to the direction of their approach: the energy crystals floating all over the Sacred Ground stage. To come across one of these and pass by without smashing it required almost inhuman restraint. Just like Haruyuki had, players would simply punch them on their way past, even if their special-attack gauge was full. And the crystals made a particular sound when they were broken.

  Thus, Haruyuki split his concentration between his vision and his hearing. Would a human form cutting blackly through the milky white sky be first? Or would he hear the bell-like sound of destruction first?

  Still on guard, he glanced to his side and saw that at some point, Lime Bell and Chocolat Puppeteer had sat down on the ground, back-to-back. Both of their heads were hanging, and given that neither of them was moving an inch, they appeared to have somehow fallen asleep.

  He was the one who had told them to rest, but even so, he grinned wryly at how easily they had dropped off. But he soon wiped the smile from his face. Chiyuri had spent three days looking for an Enemy with a laser for him, and Chocolat had already been on a continuous dive in this field for eleven days. It was no wonder they were both tired.

  Have a good sleep, you two, he mouthed silently, and once again he took up his stance on guard.

  About four hours after they had started on standby, the enemy still hadn’t appeared, and Haruyuki was enduring a de-buff that came from within—hunger. It was true that his actual body in the real world was starving, but those signals shouldn’t be able to transmit to the Accelerated World. So the hunger was a fake that his brain—no, his spirit was selfishly creating. He knew it was a fake, but that didn’t make the sensation of his avatar’s stomach tightening up go away.

  If he had known this was what would happen, he would have eaten a double order of the chocolate gelato at Enjiya. And he would have added miniwaffles to the top.

  Thoughts like this rolling through his mind, he pressed his hands against his stomach, and then he saw something flash in the corner of his vision: a shiny, burned brown. His eyes moved that way as if sucked in to see the armor skirt of Chocolat Puppeteer, asleep with her legs out to one side. The more he looked, the more it seemed like the wonderful color of chocolate.

  The color of normal duel avatars came in a wide range and variety, but the material was basically the same. Not plastic, not glass, and of course, not metal—a hard crystal. Chocolat would have been no exception to this rule; the armor of her entire body was an inorganic substance that was only the color of chocolate. Haruyuki understood this in his head.

  But as someone who had been eating chocolate ice cream at Enjiya’s for many years, his instincts were telling him this kind of texture was not possible with a fake. Of course, he couldn’t exactly bite into it to make sure, but if he cautiously tried touching it a little with a finger…

  “What are you doing?”

  Suddenly, he heard a murmured voice near his ear, and with a jump, Haruyuki yanked back the left hand he’d started to extend. Timidly shifting his gaze, he saw that the light-pink eye lenses of Chocolat, who he had assumed was asleep, were shining with a reproachful light. He almost shouted immediately, “Nothing at all!” but if he woke Chiyuri—who was sleeping against the girl’s back—things would get dire.

  “Uh, um. I just couldn’t help wondering whether that chocolate color was real,” Haruyuki replied in a quiet voice, still off balance.

  Chocolat let out a sigh. “Nearly every Burst Linker who meets me says the same thing. Even my parent, Mint, and my child, Plum—that was the first thing either of them said to me in the Accelerated World.”

  “I-it was…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you remember.”

  “There’s really no need for you to apologize,” Chocolat said curtly, and then, for some reason, she raised her left hand and thrust it in Haruyuki’s face.

  “Huh…?”

  “Go ahead. Please confirm it for yourself.”

  “Wh-what?!”

  “I’d simply prefer it if you understood in advance, rather than getting curious about my armor during the battle and losing your focus.”

  “R-right.” Given the go-ahead, Haruyuki couldn’t hold back anymore. “Okay then, I’ll accept your kind offer.” He brought his face closer to Chocolat’s left hand. The lower part of his visor slid up automatically, and his exposed bare mouth clamped down around the slender index and middle fingers.

  Instantly, Chocolat shuddered with an “Eep!”

  But Haruyuki’s mind was basically taken over by the “flavor” spreading out in his mouth, and so he was unconscious to Chocolat’s reaction. Moderately sweet, slightly bitter, highly fragrant: the perfect chocolate flavor, and far more delicious than the liquid of the Chocolate Fountain he had tasted a little while before. This flavor, right, it was the finest Belgian couverture chocolate…

  “Excuse— I…I meant that you could taste the back of my hand.” Stammering, Chocolat tried to pull her fingers out, but this did not work with Haruyuki at the peak of his hunger. He licked at the avatar’s fingers again, dreaming of biscuit sticks covered in chocolate, and it felt as though his dreadfully painful pangs of hunger were gradually eased.

  “Nngh…! Y-you must have understood by now.” A faint voice slipping out of her, Chocolat twisted her body, and the motion knocked Lime Bell, sleeping up against her back.

  “Nyah…” Chiyuri lifted her face and looked back to witness Haruyuki’s act—and just as she was on the verge of doing so…

  Kashak! The faint, distant sound touched Haruyuki’s hearing.

  “……!!”

  His mind instantly switched gears, and he took his mouth off Chocolat’s fingers and stood up. His visor had no sooner closed again than he was calling out sharply in a quiet voice, “Chocolat, Bell, they’re here!”

  Immediately, the faces of both Chocolat Puppeteer, holding her left hand and panting, and Lime Bell, watching this curiously with sleepy eyes, stiffened.

  “Where?” Quickly getting to her feet, Chiyuri surveyed their surroundings. “I can’t see them.”

  “I heard a crystal breaking. Southwest. Probably about a hundred meters away.”

  “There’s a passage there that goes between the university and the high school. If they come in through the gate and not over the wall, they’ll be approaching here from the west. And, Silver Crow?”

  Haruyuki reflexively shrank back. Naturally, he assumed he would be censured for his previous act, but Chocolat settled with simply glaring at him and then quickly saying, “My name does take quite some time, so when you call me, you can simply shorten Chocolat to Choco.”

  “Oh, then you should call me Bell.”

  “J-just call me Crow.”

  Chocolat nodded lightly at their responses and turned her face away. “All right, understood. They’re coming.”

 
Haruyuki shifted his gaze to the west once more at basically the same time as several figures assembled on the roof of a single-story temple. Four.

  “Four, huh?”

  “And one of them is excessively large, hmm?”

  They were still some distance away, so Haruyuki and his defenders couldn’t make out color or shape, but even still, they could clearly see that the one on the far right was a very large avatar.

  Bigger than Cyan Pile—no, Frost Horn, even, Haruyuki thought.

  “The two on the left are Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper,” Chocolat murmured in a strained voice. Even from this distance, she could identify her longtime friends. So then the two on the right, including the large avatar, must be Burst Linkers given ISS kits by Magenta Scissor, or—

  “Both of you, get down!” Haruyuki made Chiyuri and Chocolat step back while he himself took a step forward. He saw the large one on the right and the two on the left all raise a hand at the same time. He had seen this motion before.

  Dark Shot.

  He didn’t know if their voices actually reached him, but Haruyuki distinctly heard the technique name in his ears.

  Against the backdrop of the pure, pearl-white sky, their three hands were enveloped in a dark, sinister aura. This concentrated in the centers of their palms and built up for a moment before becoming ink-black beams and gushing out.

  By that time, Haruyuki was already shouting, arms crossed in front of him: “Laser Sword!!”

  Shkeeenk! The crisp sound rang out, and swords of silver light expanded in an X shape.

  The dark beams, now fused into one, reached him, slamming into the intersection of the blades stretching out from his arms.

  The pressure pushed him back about twenty centimeters over the arabesque patterns of the ground. But Crow stopped there and roared, “Unh…aaaaaah!”

  He yanked his arms down sharply to the sides. The dark beam scattered and dispersed, melting into the atmosphere of the stage before disappearing.

  Dark Shot was one of the two techniques possible when an ISS kit user activated IS mode. “IS mode” was short for “Incarnate System mode.” Just as the name suggested, this was not a normal special attack but rather an Incarnate attack.

  A trained imagination flowed into the Image Control circuit of the Brain Burst program, normally a supporting system, and caused an overwrite. This was the logic of an Incarnate attack. Although it was called an overwrite, the power of it basically rendered the normal defensive abilities of a duel avatar ineffective. The reasoning was that you could only handle an Incarnate attack with another Incarnate attack. Of course, this sort of attack was extremely difficult to obtain. To master just one of the four basic techniques—power expansion, range expansion, defense expansion, movement expansion—required many long hours of training in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

  But simply by equipping it, a kit user gained the range-expansion technique Dark Shot and the power-expansion technique Dark Blow. Both were basic techniques, but with the two together, the user had all-purpose attack power. If the user launched the punch and laser, both impossible to defend against—and both of which had no connection with the special-attack gauge—in succession, there was no way for a midlevel Burst Linker without an Incarnate attack to resist.

  Haruyuki had mastered the Incarnate attack Laser Sword under the guidance of his master, Sky Raker, but the category was range expansion, and the power was basically a normal thrusting attack plus a little extra. It wasn’t suited to defensive use, and on top of that, the Dark Shot launched by the enemy group contained the power of three people. But even so, Haruyuki believed he would absolutely not be pushed back by this technique. As if they could beat him.

  “Shoot as many times as you want—it’s no use!!” Haruyuki shouted toward the attackers lined up fifty meters away, the overlay of his Incarnate still lodged in both arms. “I’ll watch this technique any number of times, repel it any number of times! As if I’m scared of a technique that never evolves!”

  The “any number of times” was a bit of an exaggeration, but this was a fact, at any rate. However, Haruyuki had repelled Dark Shot when he was transformed into the sixth Chrome Disaster, and now that he had sealed away the armor, his defensive power had dropped significantly.

  Nevertheless, in a battle using the Incarnate System, simply taking a thought to the extreme had serious meaning. When it came down to a conflict between overwrites, in the end, it was a fight pitting the strength of different imaginations against one another. The Dark Shots he had knocked back left and right when he was Disasterfied had strengthened the image in Haruyuki’s mind.

  In contrast, the techniques of the kit users were not thus strengthened, because the sources of their techniques were not in their hearts but rather in the foreign objects parasitizing their avatars. Haruyuki was proclaiming that truth, but it seemed that this was not understood by their attackers; three of them raised their right hands once more.

  “I’m telling you, it’s pointless!!” Now, Haruyuki took on an attack posture. He readied his left arm in front of his body and drew his right arm back at shoulder height, a motion that strongly resembled the Black King Incarnate attack, Vorpal Strike.

  “Dark Shot.” This time, the lifeless sound of the technique name being called faintly reached him.

  He howled his battle cry to overwrite that voice: “Laser Lance!!”

  Wrapped up to the shoulder in silver light, he thrust his right arm forward with all his might, and the dazzling, shining Incarnate lance was launched with a metallic roar. It collided violently with the three black beams pressing in on him, and a spray of light and dark danced and fought each other.

  Too far…?! No, it’ll reach!! Haruyuki clenched his teeth and mustered up every bit of image power inside him.

  If the Laser Sword he had used before had been a combat technique that expanded and contracted at high speed, a sword of light from either hand, then this Laser Lance was a mid-range attack that took time to launch compressed light from his right hand as a lance. The range in which it maintained 100 percent of its power was at present limited to twenty meters, and the power weakened dramatically after that.

  The lance was already stretched out twenty-five meters, so it was fair to say that it was at its limit for practical distance. But ever since Kuroyukihime had informed him of the existence of a second stage for the Incarnate attack—the practical technique—he had been working independently on different kinds of tricks.

  There were two types of practical techniques. A “composite attack,” with two or more of the four basic attributes, and a “special attack,” which did not fit in with any attribute. In order to cover the long-distance fighting that Silver Crow was so poor at, Haruyuki had explored ways to further expand the range of his Laser Lance. The answer he had reached after countless failures was to cut the Lance with his Sword.

  “Nngh…aaah!” A low cry slipping out, he pulled his fully extended right arm back bit by bit. The image of the lance trying to charge forward stretched like rubber. Once his right hand returned to his shoulder, the elasticity of the lance reached its limit. In that instant, a short sword of light was lodged in his left hand, readied in front of his chest.

  “Go!” With a brief shout, he severed the lance of his right hand at the base with the sword of his left hand.

  Zwwank! The air shook, and the now-freed lance of light shot forward with incredible speed. It sent the aggressive jet-black beam scattering in all directions, just like in the previous skirmish, and then closed in on the aggressors, as if following the beam’s trajectory backward.

  However, the technique—which Haruyuki had secretly named Laser Javelin—had a weak point: its hit precision would worsen from logic overpowering it. The lance carved out a faint arc in the air and plunged into the roof of the low temple the four enemies were standing on. After a pause, a flash whiter than the temple itself erupted and ripped a giant hole in the building.

  Here, finally, two of the attackers�
��Mint Mitten on the right, and Plum Flipper standing to the left—looked shaken, albeit slightly. They’d probably never had their IS mode technique repelled and counterattacked to this extent before. Their silhouettes, small like Chocolat’s, crept backward.

  Yet, the tall avatar with her arms crossed threw her right hand up into the air, essentially ignoring Haruyuki’s counterattack. Perhaps she had a sword-shaped weapon; the long, sharp tip checked the movement of the two starting to retreat. Here, likely having been given some instruction, the four enemy avatars jumped down from the temple that was starting to crumble to the ground and began to slowly walk toward Haruyuki and his comrades.

  “Crow, that was really something.”

  “I’d like to say I expected nothing less.”

  Chiyuri and then Chocolat murmured from behind him.

  “This is just starting, guys,” Haruyuki replied in a quiet voice. “Or rather, now it’s you two—Bell, Chocolat…er, Choco—taking the lead now. I’m counting on you.”

  “Yup! Leave it to us!”

  “Indeed.”

  Even during this quick exchange, the four attackers continued walking directly toward them. The two on the left still moved rather awkwardly, but the tall avatar next to them—the apparent leader—and the super-large avatar on the far right held their heads high as they strode toward Haruyuki and his friends.

  Once they had gotten about five meters away, the leader raised her right hand again. Everyone stopped.

  At this distance, he could pick out the details of their duel avatars. Standing on the far left was an F-type with big gloves on both hands, large boots on both feet. The armor of her body, including a head part reminiscent of a knit hat, was a bright mint green. She was probably Mint Mitten.

  The F-type next to her had shoulders, waist, and elbows enveloped by popping spherical armor. She wore a round hat on her head, and her coloring was a muted reddish-purple. This had to be Plum Flipper.

  Both of them were small, cute avatars with the same air as Chocolat Puppeteer. However, their cuteness was significantly damaged by the crimson eyeball attached to their chests—the ISS kit. While the eyeball emitted a powerful light like it was starving, the glittering in their own eye lenses was empty. They seemed to recognize Chocolat standing behind Haruyuki—their friend until a few days ago—as nothing more than a target for destruction.