The Red Crest

by Reki Kawahara

  “Huh?!” Haruyuki was stunned. “It wasn’t because of the nonaggression pact the Red King was advocating?!”

  “There was indeed that.” Next to him, Kuroyukihime pulled her chin back a centimeter or so. “But immediately before the first meeting of the Seven Kings was held and became the stage for tragedy, I received certain information from one of the kings. Red Rider wasn’t just proposing a mutual nonaggression pact among the seven major Legions—he was also completing ‘physical means’ of essentially forcing it to be enacted.”

  “Physical…means…”

  “Yes. You might well call it an absolute power. A gun that would be distributed to all of the seven major Legions on which the safety would only be released in the event of an attack by another Legion. In appearance, it was a very ordinary revolver-type handgun, but it was no mere Enhanced Armament. It shot immensely powerful Incarnate bullets, the accuracy rate was one hundred percent, and the number of bullets it held was infinite. So, for example, if a hundred people came at you in the Territories, as long as the defending side had this gun, they would have the power to easily wipe out the enemy.”

  Kuroyukihime’s words at once brought Haruyuki’s temperature—which had started to rise at being pressed up against her—back down at once. Aware of the gooseflesh standing up on his arms, he shook his head in a motion that resembled shivering. “Th-that’s…I mean, he might have been a king, but there’s no way he could make something like that, that kind of powerful Enhanced Armament from scratch. I mean, even the Seven Arcs don’t have that kind of power.”

  “I…also thought that when I first heard this; I didn’t believe it. But, well, the king who told me about it had an actual Incarnate gun. Said that it was a sample from Rider. She demonstrated it for me in a duel stage with just the two of us. It was a Demon City, with its solid terrain, but…I saw a third of the stage become level ground pocked with craters in mere seconds. And the side of the gun was indeed emblazoned with the crossed guns emblem and a safety.”

  Having gotten this far in her explanation, Kuroyuki slumped against Haruyuki’s shoulder. Her face was turned far downward, and he couldn’t see the look on it. After a brief silence, the voice that came was tinged once more with an echo of sorrow somehow.

  “I was pushed into a state of serious confusion and anxiety. The fact that Rider hoped for the stagnation of the world so much that he would create this gun, so like the nuclear deterrence forces of old, was a shock to me. I believed his motivation for creating weapons was simply that he was seeking the excitement and delight of the duel.”

  She laced the fingers of both hands together and squeezed before continuing her monologue.

  “Until I was shown that gun, I thought I would be able to persuade Rider with words—ask him what the meaning was of the existence of Burst Linkers that didn’t fight, tell him we should continue to duel even if we were saddled with the level-nine sudden-death rule. I thought the other kings and Red Rider himself would accept my assertions. Because I believed—no, I was convinced that like me, everyone, from the bottoms of their hearts, more than anything else, was seeking the thing that lay beyond level ten.”

  The instant he heard this, a faint, distant voice came back to life in the depths of Haruyuki’s mind.

  I…I want to know. Whatever it takes, I have to know.

  Accelerating your thinking, you can get money, grades, fame. Is this really the meaning behind our Duels? Is this the compensation we seek, the limit we can reach? Isn’t…isn’t there something beyond this? This…shell called a human being…outside…something more…”

  Kuroyukihime had said this the previous fall at a coffee shop in Higashi Koenji, the day after Haruyuki had become a Burst Linker. He’d known basically nothing about the Accelerated World at that point, but her words had made their way deep, deep into his heart and lingered there. Even now, eight months later, he felt like he could hear the faint echoes of it if he listened hard.

  “Something…more,” he murmured, and then he raised his voice to continue. “I don’t think it’s just the kings. I’m sure all Burst Linkers are thinking like that from the bottoms of their hearts.”

  “…Yes, I suppose. But at the time, I thought I had been betrayed. I believed that Red Rider was so afraid of losing Brain Burst that he brought forward this nonaggression pact, and on top of that, he developed a gun incorporating the prohibited Incarnate System—the ultimate weapon. I believed he was trying to make the world stagnate. The respect I had for Rider, the solidarity I felt with him as a comrade in arms, vanished. I attended the meeting of the Seven Kings with one resolve—a murderous intent. To take Rider’s head while the safeties for all seven of the Incarnate guns that had supposedly been already completed were locked and make it so that those guns could never be fired.”

  Still leaning against Haruyuki, Kuroyukihime raised her right hand slightly and stared at it for a while. Almost as though she were searching for traces of blood somewhere on those pale fingers.

  “Naturally, I was prepared for the fact that the other Kings—especially Rider’s sworn ally, Blue Knight, and Purple Thorn, who was basically in a romantic relationship with him—would not understand my actions. In fact…I even suspected these two had already agreed to Rider’s plan behind the scenes. Thus I was tormented with the thought that I would never get another chance outside of this meeting to take the heads of five level niners and reach level ten. I would first push Rider to total loss with a surprise attack, and then, in the massive confusion that was sure to follow, four others.”

  She paused for a moment and squeezed her right hand tightly shut.

  “No, I’ll be precise. I would defeat Blue Knight, Purple Thorn, Yellow Radio, and Green Grandé. I attended the meeting of the Seven Kings with this murderous intent. You already know what happened after that. In the end, I took only Rider’s head and shamelessly lived on myself. Immediately after that, we took on the Four Gods of the Castle with the full mobilization of Nega Nebulus, and I destroyed the Legion itself.”

  “…Uh-huh…” Haruyuki could only offer a small voice as he nodded. He had been told about the brave and sad end of the initial Nega Nebulus ten days earlier, when he had met Utai Shinomiya. The Legion had succeeded in rescuing Ardor Maiden from the altar of the God Suzaku at that time, but the remaining two Elements of the Legion were still in a sealed state, and Haruyuki knew only their names.

  “…?” Suddenly, he felt like he could hear the sound of water flowing somewhere in the distance. But when he glanced over, the faucet in the kitchen was, of course, clearly off, so he brought his awareness back to Kuroyukihime’s story. As he did, a meager doubt he hadn’t noticed before popped up in his mind.

  “Um, Kuroyukihime. I understand why you went to take down Red Rider. But why were the other four you were going for those four?” He asked it timidly, but then suddenly answered himself: “Oh, right. The other person was the one who told you about the Incarnate gun, right? So you didn’t target her. Um, the kings are seven colors, so that king’s color…”

  The instant Haruyuki had made it this far, Kuroyukihime shuddered violently, like she’d been bathed in electric current. She sat up on the sofa, almost as if she were being repelled by it, and long hair swinging, she whirled around and slammed her face into Haruyuki’s chest.

  “Huh?! K-Kuroyukihime?!” Haruyuki’s hoarse voice was drowned out by Kuroyukihime’s tense cry.

  “I…I was a fool!!” She pressed her face into his left shoulder, and her hands gripped both his shoulders tightly. The Black King let out an even more anguished cry. “The one I should have defeated wasn’t Knight or Thorn or Radio or Grandé…or even Rider! I—I should have targeted her alone! It was my first and last chance…It took me far too long…to realize that!”

  Even as he was stunned by the unexpected outburst, Haruyuki instinctively placed a hand gently on Kuroyukihime’s back. When he did so, her stiff body relaxed slightly. Haruyuki summoned his resolve and asked the small ear next
to his mouth, “So, this ‘her’—you mean the last person, the White King, right?”

  After a few seconds, the face pressed up against him nodded sharply. “Yes. The White King showed me the gun Rider made and razed a stage with it…I knew she had absolutely no physical attack power, be it long range or short, so I believed without question that the incredible power of the Incarnate bullets was the ability of the gun itself. But…even the White King, perfect in all ways, made just one careless mistake.”

  “Mistake?”

  “Mmm. She overlooked the possibility that when I brought Red Rider to total loss, the Enhanced Armament he had would be transferred to my storage.”

  “Enhanced Armament…S-so you mean—?!” Haruyuki’s eyes flew open.

  “Yes, the gun in question.” Kuroyukihime nodded slightly. “After the fall of Nega Nebulus, having lost everything, not only did I cut myself off from the global net—for a long time, I didn’t even accelerate. But one winter night months after the incident, I suddenly opened the Brain Burst console. And I noticed there was a Rider-made gun in my storage. I—as if guided by it, I dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field and made the gun into an object. It was indeed the exact same gun the White King had test-fired for me the day before the meeting of the Seven Kings. The safety was off. I held the gun, turned it on my own home in the Accelerated World, and pulled the trigger. However.”

  In a voice containing pain and regret and hatred, Kuroyukihime announced, “No bullet came out. Not the Incarnate bullets that had blown away the stage that day, not even a regular bullet. Even though there were bullets in the cylinder. As I pulled the trigger over and over again, I finally understood. That the gun…wasn’t about destruction…but rather a symbol of peace. Rider had created them with the intention of gifting all the Kings with a gun that did not shoot bullets as proof of peace and friendship after the mutual nonaggression pact was concluded.”

  “B-but when the White King fired it, you said bullets definitely came out.” After he gave voice to this, dumbfounded, Haruyuki realized something. Bullets had been launched from a gun that could not fire. There was only one logic that would make that possible.

  “Exactly. The bullets that so totally destroyed the Demon City stage that day…were the overwrite of the White King herself. And what was launched from the gun was a destructive Incarnate. As for the reason why she alone would have had the gun early…Most likely, Rider had discussed things with her. The design, the name of the gun.”

  “What…was the name of it?”

  “Seven Roads. A revolver with seven bullets. I took all the bullets out of the cylinder. They shone in the seven colors of red, blue, purple, yellow, green, white, and black.”

  “Seven lords, seven roads,” Haruyuki murmured.

  “The seven color trajectories reaching out from the single gun barrel did not cross, but had the same starting point. And the same end point. When I felt that this was the intent Rider had put into the gun, I understood that I had been manipulated. I had been made to believe that a gun of peace was a gun of destruction. I had been made to be afraid of a nonexistent threat. And in the end, I had been made to stain these hands with the blood of a friend. This manipulation wasn’t just pushing Rider to total loss. For a long time before that, possibly from immediately after I became a Burst Linker, she had made me dance however she pleased, for so many years.”

  Haruyuki could say nothing further to this sorrowful soliloquy. He put all the feelings into the hand that gently stroked Kuroyukihime’s back, but her slender body stayed stiff, shaking. And he was able to hazard a guess as to the reason for this, albeit a hazy one.

  The story wasn’t finished yet.

  He had been invited to Kuroyukihime’s house in a corner of Asagaya Jutaku the previous week. The town house she lived in by herself was clean and simple and was filled with quiet and sadness. She had explained that she was living by herself as a junior high student because of an attack in the real on a certain Burst Linker. In which case, the object of this attack was the very White King who had deceived Kuroyukihime, manipulated her, and made her take the Red King’s head.

  Squeezing Haruyuki’s shoulders so hard it hurt, Kuroyukihime pushed an even more strained voice from the depths of her throat. “When I returned to the real world from the nearest portal…I was still in half disbelief. Or rather, I wanted to believe—she would never betray me, trick me like that. Because…the White King, Transient Eternity, White Cosmos—in the Accelerated World she is my parent, and in the real world…my sister, older by a year.”

  Ever since he had become a Burst Linker, Haruyuki had sometimes thought, from the extremely one-sided information he had been given: What if Kuroyukihime had a special relationship with one of the kings? And that king was a person very close to her in the real as well?

  It had been nearly six months before that Haruyuki had asked about Kuroyukihime’s parent, and she had only replied with these mysterious words:

  That person was once…the person closest to me. I believed this Linker would shine brightly forever at the center of my world and keep all kinds of darkness and cold at bay.

  However, one day…one incident, one instant, I realized that this was an ephemeral illusion. Now you could go so far as to say that, for me, this person is my archenemy. So much so that I could almost believe that this inexhaustible hatred existed inside me from the moment we first met.

  The “instant” in this recollection—it was none other than the moment when she realized that her parent and older sister the White King had manipulated her and made her push Red Rider into total loss.

  “I’m not trying to say that all the sin of taking Rider’s head should be forced onto the White King or anything like that,” Kuroyukihime noted into his ear, almost as if she had read his thoughts.

  “Even if she hadn’t shown me that gun, I would have resisted Rider’s proposal to the very end, and it was me myself who fully believed the words of the White King and not a single word from the Red King…However, at the time, when I ran from my own room to my sister’s, still half in disbelief, and she acknowledged everything while smiling gently, I was seized by an intense rage, like nothing I’d ever felt before. I decided that the fact that Rider had lost Brain Burst, the fact that I had lost Nega Nebulus, was all her fault. Before I knew it, I was holding the letter opener on her desk.”

  Having told this much of her story, Kuroyukihime pursed her lips together for a moment, and whether he wanted to see it or not, a visual sprang up in the back of Haruyuki’s mind.

  A girl with black hair clutching a small knife in both hands, tears spilling endlessly down shuddering pale cheeks, anger and hatred swirling in her obsidian eyes, almost eclipsed by an even greater sadness. With the knife turned on a girl only slightly taller than herself, the girl closes the distance between them by one step, another. But even with the sharp tip of the blade before her, the smile on the lips of the other girl does not disappear.

  “I said to my sister, ‘Push the knife in. Direct duel with me right here.’ I said I’d offer her the same fate as Rider. And her smile didn’t so much as twitch as she answered me.” At the same time as Kuroyukihime spoke, the lips of the girl in the screen of his imagination moved. “‘Don’t say that. I don’t want to take even Brain Burst from you.’ In other words, if my sister and I, both at level nine, fought, she would beat me and make me lose all my points by the sudden-death rule—that’s what she meant. And despite the fact that I had never once fought my sister seriously, I knew that was certainly what would happen. I stood there frozen, and she tried to take the knife from me. The tip of the blade cut her palm.”

  The long story appeared to be coming to an end. All the tension suddenly drained out of Kuroyukihime, and she leaned heavily against Haruyuki as she continued haltingly, “You know the rest. The fact that I turned a knife on my sister was caught on the cameras of our home net, and I was expelled from the family home in Minato Ward under the pretext of mental health treatment. A
nd thus I lost not only my Legion but also my actual family—although I never had any real attachment to them. And that is the whole of the story of me; the first Red King, Red Rider; and the White King, White Cosmos.”

  After a pause, Kuroyukihime continued in a slightly different tone. “So? Are you shocked? Or perhaps contemptuous, Haruyuki? For the sake of my objective, I might someday sacrifice even you.”

  The moment he heard this, Haruyuki used the hands that had been stroking Kuroyukihime’s back to pull her toward him. At the same time, he replied in a voice filled with every emotion in his heart, “If there are higher levels, it’s only natural to aim for them. I mean, that’s the reason Brain Burst exists.”

  This exchange was indeed the same as the one he had had with her at the coffee shop the day after he became a Burst Linker. Eight months had passed since then, but he felt the need to assure her that his own feelings hadn’t changed a bit.

  “The things you’ve lost,” he continued, “you can get them back again—no, you can rebuild. Right now, Nega Nebulus’s still a Legion with just six people, but I’m sure the remaining Elements will be back any day now. And we’ll recruit new Linkers, too, so it’ll be even bigger than it was before. And then this time for sure, as a Burst Linker, you’ll fight the White King fair and square and settle this. I’m always right by your side. Right up until you reach level ten.”

  Even after Haruyuki closed his mouth, Kuroyukihime stayed silent for a while. Normally, this would be when he got anxious that he may have accidentally said the wrong thing, but at just this moment, the thought didn’t even cross his mind. He simply continued to put his strength in his hands.

  Finally, the faintest sensation on his left shoulder. One small drop, then two fell and soaked into the fabric of his shirt, reaching his skin. “Thank you, Haruyuki. My decision was not mistaken, after all. From the bottom of my heart, I’m so glad I chose you.”