The Red Crest

by Reki Kawahara

  “Nngh!” Haruyuki desperately tried to break away, but the sharply tapered edges of Cerberus’s armor caught him like thorns. The wolf avatar was glued to his front, his arms around Haruyuki’s chest, and his legs around his waist, holding him fast.

  “This is one other method of using Physical Immune.”

  Immediately after he heard this whispered voice in his ear, an incredible pressure assaulted his chest and stomach. Crow’s metal armor creaked eerily, abnormally, and orange sparks shot off in all directions. The gauge in the upper left of his field of view was mercilessly shaved away.

  Although the majority of Burst Linkers had mouths, they had no need to breathe. Thus, underwater or in outer space, or when their throats or chests were being constricted, there was no suffocation damage. The reason Haruyuki’s gauge was nevertheless decreasing was because he was taking physical pressure damage. The bare-handed restraint technique was something Haruyuki’s metal armor would have been able to resist, had the overwhelming strength of Cerberus’s armor not brought it up into the land of special attack.

  Of. Course. Even as he suffered through this crushing of his body, Haruyuki seriously admired Cerberus.

  “Assume the techniques you showed Cerberus in the duel yesterday won’t work on him today,” Kuroyukihime had said during the special training with Haruyuki the day before at lunch together with Fuko. Thus, Haruyuki had made free use of the Guard Reversal he hadn’t used initially and won. But Cerberus was already responding to those techniques in the span of a single day.

  “You’re strong, Cerberus. Really strong.” Haruyuki pushed the words out from his constricted chest, as he endured the pain. He had said only moments before that they’d talk with their fists, but he simply could not go without asking. “So. What is making you panic like this? You said you’ll stop being yourself if you don’t keep winning…What does that mean?”

  He didn’t think he’d get an answer. But in a surprise twist, an extremely quiet voice came once more from the face before his eyes.

  “That…is because, just like number two, who you fought yesterday…I, number one, am also nothing more than a spare.”

  “A-a spare?”

  “Yes. Number two and myself are only permitted to be Cerberus during the time we are performing our respective roles. And my role…is to win duels. A tool to simply win and stock up points.”

  Haruyuki forgot for a moment what a desperate situation he was in and set his brain to work at full power. Cerberus II, appearing at the end of the duel the previous day, had said he was “number two,” living in the avatar’s left shoulder. “Because I was tuned for a certain purpose.” And: “Equip that thing that you sealed off somewhere.”

  Haruyuki assumed “that thing” indicated the cursed Enhanced Armament the Disaster. If the role of II was to control the Armor of Catastrophe, then the role of I was to build up Burst Points. Was that it?

  “So is that the reason you’re still at level one? To increase the number of Burst Points when you win a duel,” Haruyuki murmured.

  “That’s right.” The head stuck to him nodded slightly. “Therefore, I have to continue to win. I have to win…and continue to prove that I am a useful tool.”

  The instant he heard these words through the armor pressed up against him, something burst into red flames deep inside Haruyuki. He remembered how he had told his parent Kuroyukihime something similar back when he first became a Burst Linker. Saying that she knew that he was actually just a disposable pawn, a tool to simply be given orders, like it was the appropriate way to treat someone like him. Hearing this, Kuroyukihime had slapped his cheek, and tears had welled up in her eyes. It was likely in that moment that Haruyuki had become a true Burst Linker.

  “Prove you’re a useful tool? To whom? Your parent? Comrades? Or maybe your Legion Master?” Cerberus didn’t make a move to answer this interrogation from Haruyuki, whose rage was bleeding into the questions. Regardless, however, Haruyuki continued to shout, choking up as he did: “That kind of proof, there’s no value in that! The only thing a Burst Linker has to prove is the strength of their heart! And the one they prove that to is always and only their own self!”

  “Then…please prove that right now!” Now Cerberus shouted, his voice burning with several kinds of emotion. “For you, this duel is nothing more than one fight among hundreds! So even if you lose, no one will abandon you! But it’s different for me! I have to win every duel! If you’re saying that my proof is a fake, and yours is the real thing, then prove it right now! Please win against me here and now, Silver Crow!!”

  As the shriek grew louder, the pressure of the bear hug increased. His physical strength itself didn’t match that of a large blue-type avatar, but his armor, boasting an absolute hardness, was a weapon in and of itself. Crow’s silver armor grew dented, holes gouged out by Cerberus’s edges.

  Haruyuki had just under 30 percent left in his health gauge. At this rate, he wouldn’t last another minute before being blasted away. Even so, Haruyuki nodded his helmet firmly. “Understood. I’ll prove it.”

  He had no sooner made this brief statement than he was placing both hands on Cerberus’s head and trying with all his strength to tear him off. This was normally the place where he would attack with blows if his hands were free, but punches and elbows wouldn’t work on Cerberus while Physical Immune was activated.

  “Nngh…aaah!” A groan slipping out of him, he strained his arms desperately, but even when their two masks were fifty centimeters apart, the arms Cerberus had wrapped around his back showed absolutely no sign of releasing him. In fact, the pressure damage increased due to Haruyuki’s efforts, and the speed of his gauge’s decrease accelerated.

  “It’s no use, Crow. I’ve been shown a vault’s worth of material on you. You have no means of turning a situation like this around.” The voice that came from the visor pinning him down had regained its quiet.

  Those words were definitely not a boast. His special-attack gauge was fully charged, so he could have flown up to a high altitude with Cerberus still hanging on to him and slammed into the ground with a sudden drop to do damage, but Haruyuki’s back—the part that deployed his silver wings—was currently held fast. If he tried to force them open, he might actually damage his wings instead.

  So the reason Cerberus had used his restraint technique on Haruyuki’s chest rather than his more fragile head was because he was aiming to render his flying ability useless. He really had somehow looked into Silver Crow’s weak points. Haruyuki was curious about who exactly had prepared those materials, but he had more important things to deal with at the moment.

  “Then those materials were apparently…not complete,” he said with a groan, and he mustered up every ounce of strength he had to stretch his arms out all the way. Sparks scattered not only from his constricted chest but also from his shoulders and elbows. Their two masks were nearly a meter apart, but even still, Cerberus’s arms would not let go. However, that was not Haruyuki’s aim.

  A mere meter. To create this distance, he had accelerated the loss of his already negligible gauge.

  “Unh…aaaaaaah!!” Shouting, Haruyuki released his arms and quickly crossed them before his eyes.

  Rrrk! The air shook, and a pure white light gushed from Silver Crow’s mirrored visor.

  “Wha…?” Cerberus gasped, hoarse.

  Haruyuki glared at the goggles, which had narrowed to centimeter-long slits, before flinging his arms open and shouting the technique name.

  “Head…buuuuuuuuuutt!!”

  Drawing out a trail of light like a comet, the round helmet charged downward diagonally at an incredible speed. Instantly, his head crossed the meter between them and slammed into Cerberus’s face. The impact, enough to make the stage shudder, radiated outward and sent the piles of snow around them flying off into the distance.

  If this had been an ordinary head butt, it would, of course, not have broken the protection of Physical Immune; it would, in fact, have shattered Crow’s v
isor. But what Haruyuki launched was Silver Crow’s level-one special-attack Head Butt. Its range was small, and the pre-motion was long, so normally, even when he did bring it out, it didn’t make contact. In fact, the first time he had deployed it, a moment that should have been commemorated, he’d been shamefully crushed by Ash Roller’s motorcycle before it activated, so he had basically gone entirely without using it ever since.

  Thus, the majority of Burst Linkers wouldn’t even know of the existence of this technique, and the reference materials Cerberus had seen would be no exception to that. And even if in the unlikely case that it was noted there, the detailed characteristics of the technique would absolutely not have been.

  The damage characteristics for Head Butt were half-physical/striking and half-energy/light. A light energy attack had the exact opposite characteristics as the nihilistic energy attack best represented by Dark Blow and was falsely similar to a laser attack. With no heat, it pierced essentially any armor and gave a pure impact with no directionality. In other words, even if half of the Head Butt power was repelled by Cerberus’s Physical Immune, the other half would reach him.

  And there was one more thing. The majority of close-range special attacks canceled out any reaction damage, no matter what the target of the attack. Attacking with a normal head butt would have carved away Haruyuki’s own gauge, but right now—

  “Nngah!” Cerberus cried out, showered in the entirely unexpected, extremely close-range impact, while at the same time, he released the hold of his arms. This one instant knocked him onto his back on the exposed white road. Just like the day before, throwing damage was applied, and the health gauge that had dropped more than 30 percent in the initial impact decreased another 30 percent.

  Half-embedded in the hard road by the impact, Cerberus boldly attempted an immediate counterattack. He reached out once more and attempted to grab ahold of Crow, who dropped down a moment later.

  But Haruyuki’s own hands flashed out lightning quick to seize Cerberus’s arms instead, and the metallic wings on his back, now free, were deployed to the fullest.

  “Ah…Aaaaaah!” The battle cry pouring out of him, he peeled the heavy metal avatar off the road surface and ascended vertically upward at top speed. In the blink of an eye, he had reached an altitude of nearly a hundred meters.

  Hazy sunlight pushed through the clouds high up in the distance to make the Ice stage glitter beautifully, the pure white of snow and the pale blue of ice. With Cerberus dangling from his hands, Haruyuki went into hovering mode, and the two avatars were also wrapped in the spectacular silver light.

  Wolfram Cerberus didn’t so much as twitch. Haruyuki thought that maybe the personality switch had happened again, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The visor covering the original face opened with a clack.

  Cerberus looked around at the icy world that continued to the far-off horizon with the exposed black goggles. “I had no idea…So you can see this far even in a normal duel stage, hmm?”

  “Yeah. This world’s infinite,” Haruyuki replied, and then continued after a brief pause. “There’s still a ton of things you don’t know about the Accelerated World, Cerberus. It’s the same for me, though. Sometimes, I think that even the wins and losses of the duels are really nothing more than one element of this world.”

  “One…element,” Cerberus murmured in a voice that was almost inaudible.

  “Yeah.” Haruyuki nodded deeply. “A long time ago, in that hospital you can see over there”—as he spoke, he fine-tuned the direction of his body to make it so that the large hospital soaring up to the northeast of Asagaya Station would enter Cerberus’s field of view—“I fought a close friend. It ended up with me dangling him just like this. He was on the verge of total point loss, and I was about to drop him to the ground.”

  “…”

  “…But I couldn’t. And not because he was my friend. It wasn’t because I felt sorry for him, either. It was because I realized that what decides the meaning of the duel isn’t the BB system; it’s us. We fight to get Burst Points, go up levels, and get stronger. But that’s not everything. I’m sure there’s something bigger that we win and lose in the duels.”

  “And…what is that?”

  “I still don’t know. But I think if I fight—no, live in this world with my friends, someday I’ll find out.”

  “…”

  Shifting his gaze from the hospital in the distance to Wolfram Cerberus, silent once more, Haruyuki gasped and opened his eyes wide.

  Because he saw glittering droplets of ice falling from the edges of the goggles he could spy beyond the visor patterned after a wolf’s maw. It wasn’t that the diamond dust dancing about the stage had gotten stuck there. They were frozen tears.

  “…I, too.” His voice trembling, Cerberus moved his hands and grabbed onto Haruyuki’s arms from below, his own wrists clasped by Haruyuki’s hands. “I, too…would like…to know that. If there is something in this world…more important than winning fights…I would like to…see it.”

  “You’ll get to,” Haruyuki said, pushing back whatever it was welling up inside him, and then took a deep breath, about to continue with “Come with me” in a firm voice. But he didn’t get to utter those words.

  A pale-purple light reaching up from somewhere on the ground quickly pierced his left wing. A little after that, bwwan! He heard the high-pitched sound of vibration.

  “Ngah?!” Haruyuki cried out in surprise.

  “Aaah!” A shriek slipped out of Cerberus as well. He sounded almost like he knew the true form of the light, but before Haruyuki had time to check, he was plunging to the ground in a tailspin.

  He tried desperately to get his body under control with just his right wing, but he couldn’t manage it with the heavy Cerberus dangling from his hands. To at least not have damage for a fall from up high applied to him, he forced a reverse thrust as they were on the verge of slamming into the ground and somehow managed a soft landing.

  The place where they came down, kicking up snow, was about fifty meters to the west of the original intersection. Having finally gotten out from under the bike in the intersection, Ash Roller was for some reason pointing the index fingers of both hands intently to somewhere on the west side.

  Pulled in, Haruyuki looked in that direction.

  Bwwwan! He heard the sound again. A purple light shone on the roof of a five-story building, and at almost the same time, an incredible heat pierced his right shoulder. Combined with the previous blow, it brought the remainder of his health gauge down to less than 10 percent.

  “Ngaaah!” Haruyuki collapsed with a moan.

  In front of him, a figure blocked the way, arms spread out. Cerberus.

  “Wh-why?! It’s supposed to be my role to fight Silver Crow!!” Once more, a shout that was a shriek. These words made it clear that he knew the attacker behind the purple laser.

  Pressing on the injured area of his right shoulder with his left hand, Haruyuki stared intently at the roof of the building. It appeared that someone was standing there, but they were backlit; he could only make out a silhouette. Slender body, disproportionately large head. This figure raised the right hand that had been on its hip, popped up one finger, and lightly waved it.

  “Not like I wanna be doin’ this sorta thug stuff, Onesie.” A girl’s smiling voice.

  He had heard that Kansai accent before. More than heard it—knew it. It was the voice he had heard by his side when he had been made to stand on the witness stand at the meeting of the Seven Kings a mere four days earlier.

  “Argon Array.” The instant Haruyuki called the name in a trembling voice, the sunlight was blocked by the clouds again, and the silhouette took on color.

  Pale-purple armor covered her entire body. She wore a large hat, and the upper half of her face was hidden by large goggles with round lenses. On the front of the hat, two lenses even larger than the goggles were embedded; one was covered by a shutter, while the other was exposed.

  Argon Array�
��also known as the Quad Eyes Analyst—had the unique ability of being able to see the status of other Burst Linkers. Thus, she was given her nickname, or put another way, Haruyuki had been convinced this meant she was a type with no remarkable abilities, but…

  “So then why are you interrupt—?” Cerberus started to say in a hoarse voice, and purple light flashed.

  The source of the light was the lenses on Argon Array’s hat. Rather than targeting Haruyuki this time, the thin laser that reached out from there, with an audible vibration, passed beside Cerberus’s head and dug deep into the ice wall behind them.

  “Interrupt? You’re awful, Onesie. I was jus’ helpin’ you. Now quit messin’ around and take the boyo’s points already. Otherwise”—she was nearly thirty meters away, but even so, Haruyuki could see the cheerful and yet freezing chill-inducing grin that popped up on her face—“this time fer sure, Threezie’ll come out?”

  This statement was meaningless to Haruyuki, but as soon as he heard it, Cerberus shuddered noticeably. The angle of the arms raised to protect Haruyuki dropped slightly. However, his gray hands were clenched into tight fists. The small level-one Burst Linker looked directly at Argon, already at level eight.

  “I…I don’t want to fight only to earn points anymore!” he shouted. “Crow taught me something! That there’s something in this world…more important that points, than winning and losing—”

  Bwaaaan!

  The fourth laser shot hit Cerberus’s left side. The beam of light, narrowed down to the diameter of a needle, easily pierced the super-hard tungsten armor and its absolute resistance to all physical attacks, and the health gauge with over 30 percent left in it was instantly whittled down to less than 10 percent.

  Cerberus staggered and almost fell backward, but Haruyuki caught him with outstretched arms. However, with no strength in his body, he dropped to his knees in the snow.

  “Tut-tut, Onesie!” Argon said in a voice that even now did not lose its sunshine, even as she looked down on the two crouched helplessly on the ground. “No talkin’ back to me now. Your job’s to get loads of points, yeah? You don’t need to think about nothin’ else. I mean—”