“Honestly!” Sidling in through the open door, Chiyuri placed her right hand on her hip and continued on her tirade. “I’ve been telling you forever that you have to learn how to cook for yourself!”
“I-I do.”
“You mean you take stuff out of a box or the freezer!”
“I-I serve it on a plate.”
“That is not a meal!” She got Haruyuki’s nose in her sights with a snap of her index finger, and then held high the paper bag in her left hand. “I figured this is what would happen, so I had Mom make some lasagna. See? Smart!”
It’s not like you made it yourself! he grumbled internally, but when the fragrance of baked cheese came wafting from the bag, Haruyuki was compelled to throw himself down before her.
The lasagna, tightly packed in the heat-resistant square container, was a rare treat jam-packed with Chiyuri’s mother’s special Bolognese sauce, and it had a flavor with which—although it was also Italian food—the frozen pizza could not compare. They moved to the living room, where it took a mere fifteen minutes for Haruyuki to polish off a fourth of the whole thing and Takumu and Chiyuri to finish a third each.
“That was delicious. Your mom should open a restaurant, Chi,” Takumu said with a satisfied expression, and Haruyuki seconded his words immediately.
“For real. She can make anything: Japanese, Western, Chinese, whatever.”
“Oh, no, no way. Mom’s cooking output’s at fifty percent when she’s not making food for Dad,” Chiyuri said, looking very serious, and Haruyuki unconsciously looked down at the now empty lasagna dish.
“S-seriously? This deliciousness is only half her real power?”
“Oh, this is about ninety-five percent here. If Mom’s cooking for a candidate for my future husband—Aah what are you making me say? I’ll kill you!!” she shouted suddenly, and actually launched a kick under the table at the shins of Haruyuki before carrying a clattering pile of plates and forks into the kitchen.
After exchanging a slightly bitter smile with Takumu, who was nearly fainting in agony, Haruyuki cleared his throat and forced them back on topic. “So, about Nomi. Right. So what’s this guy’s first name?”
“Seiji? He spells it like this.” Takumu generated holo-paper on the table and moved his fingertip briskly. The characters he wrote on the virtual paper with his virtual pen read SEIJI.
“Hmm. I wonder if he’s got any older brothers or sisters,” Haruyuki muttered, and Takumu made the paper disappear, nodding.
“Yeah. I checked the graduation yearbook, and there was a student three years ahead of us called ‘Yuichi Nomi.’ But the address’s encrypted, and only graduates from the same year can read it, so I’m not sure if that’s our Nomi’s older brother or not.”
“Three grades ahead? Age-wise, he’d just barely meet the first condition…”
Because the ones able to fulfill the first condition of Burst Linker compatibility—being equipped with a Neurolinker from immediately after birth—would inevitably be the children born in the year the first Neurolinkers went on sale. This so-called “first generation” would be in grade eleven that year—that is to say, three years older than Haruyuki and his friends.
“If this Yuichi is a Burst Linker, Master would’ve gone to school with him for a year. But I’ve never heard her say anything about there being any older Burst Linkers at Umesato.”
“Right. That’s true.” Humming thoughtfully, Haruyuki switched tracks and said, “Well, let’s leave Yuichi for now. Either way, the problem is the seventh grader Nomi. Taku, he…He accelerated during the match with you, right? Otherwise, there’s no way you could lose like that.”
“It wasn’t that big of a deal for me, you know.” Takumu smiled like the ends of his large mouth were twisting. “I mean, it’s not weird at all to lose after the first two bouts. Even without acceleration, that’s just how it is.”
“That’s not how it is. You were definitely stronger than that team captain you got in the semis!” Haruyuki was suddenly serious, protesting Takumu’s self-deprecating comments, and then lowered his voice. “Anyway, what do you think? I’m sure I saw Nomi calling out the acceleration command or something.”
After a long silence, Takumu nodded slightly. “Yeah. I saw it, too.”
“What?!”
It was Chiyuri who cried out in a high-pitched voice, back in the living room having finished washing up. Slamming a plastic bottle of green tea and three glasses down on the table, she squawked, “No way! He’s a Burst Linker?! But I mean, you guys both said there weren’t any in the newbies!”
“There aren’t. That’s the problem,” Haruyuki returned, pouting his lips and ransacking his brain. “The instant I thought he had accelerated, I accelerated, too, and checked the matching list. But Nomi wasn’t there. Taku, he was connected to the local net, right?”
“Yeah. You can’t even compete if you’re not.”
“Right. But that kind of reaction without acceleration…Taku, he dodged the first blow to the mask and the second to the side of his stomach, almost like he knew in advance you were gonna do that. Especially the second time, I dunno, it was almost as if he moved his real body while accelerated…Although I guess you can’t actually do that.”
“Uh!” Takumu cried in a strange voice, so Haruyuki responded, “Huh? Wh-what is it?”
“It’s just…Haru, you don’t know?”
“Wait a second.” Those words and that look sent a wave of déjà vu crashing over him. “Quit it. This sounds like another bit of accelerated world common sense that I don’t know. Like the Unlimited Neutral Field or the Judgment Blow, any time either of those comes up, it’s totally embarrassing.”
“Yeah, well this is the third time.” Whatever he was thinking, Takumu grinned as he grabbed a glass and filled it halfway with green tea from the plastic bottle.
He held the tea-bearing glass in his right hand, and his gaze firmly focused on the yellow-green liquid—
“Physical Burst!!”
Takumu shouted the naggingly familiar command before hurling the tea in the glass straight up with a splash.
“Wha—”
“Aah!”
Haruyuki and Chiyuri yelped in tandem, and then were, immediately, doubly shocked, eyes and mouths gaping at what they saw.
High in the air, the green tea drew long and thin arcs, and Takumu, glass in hand, caught the entire quantity while maintaining that structure!
Moving his right hand in tiny increments in line with the amorphous fluid, at the end he kept splash back to a minimum by lowering the glass in a swoosh as he caught the liquid. A second later, when its bottom hit the table with a konk, the glass contained the exact same amount of tea as when he poured it, rocking gently. A mere four drops had fallen onto the table.
“No way…,” Chiyuri murmured, and Haruyuki finally remembered where he had heard a command like this one.
He was surprised he had forgotten, however briefly. It was the forbidden Physical Full Burst command, which Kuroyukihime had used to save Haruyuki from an out-of-control car plunging toward them six months earlier. Only level-nine Burst Linkers could use this function, which accelerated the movements of your physical body a hundredfold and used 99 percent of your total points to do so.
The command Takumu had just used was no doubt the low-level version. Not a “Full” Physical Burst. It was like the same command, but in an earlier stage of development.
“So then…that’s the command to accelerate your consciousness in your physical body?” Haruyuki asked in a low voice.
“Right.” Takumu nodded slowly, looking serious. “Tenfold for three seconds, uses five points. The movements of your physical body themselves aren’t accelerated, but it’s pretty easy to avoid an opponent’s attack in hand-to-hand combat or meet it with a counterattack.”
“So if you turn it on in baseball, you hit a home run. Huh…Nomi for sure used it to avoid your stomach attack, Taku,” Haruyuki added with a sigh. He understood now why Kuroy
ukihime hadn’t taught him the command. Unlike the basic command required to fight—Burst Link—Physical Burst was only required by people using their acceleration abilities for fame or the limelight. And there was probably no end to it once you started using it. Simply imagining the ridiculous number of points you would end up using if you relied on Physical Burst for even just a few things sent a chill up his spine.
“Seiji Nomi is just like how I was until last year,” Takumu said, the edges of his mouth bleeding into the self-deprecating smile that had stained his lips lately. “Everything about him. He’s winning at tournaments with the power of acceleration and avoiding at all costs the risks of the fight, risks that are supposed to be the price you pay for the wins you get. So even if I did lose to him, I’m in no place to say—”
Chiyuri, up and standing behind Takumu in the blink of an eye, rapped him on the head with a small fist, cutting him off. “You’re wrong.” She sniffed contemptuously at Takumu, who was dumbfounded, blue glasses sliding down his nose. “You’re not the same. You were trying to win those tournaments for me, Taku. I mean, right after you won, the first thing you’d do was wave a hand at me, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“But he’s different. This Nomi kid, he didn’t look at anyone after the tournament. He just looked at himself and smiled. He’s totally different from you, Taku!”
Haruyuki’s eyes moved from Chiyuri and her resolute declaration back to Takumu, and he nodded fiercely. “She’s right, Taku. You’re not the you from back then anymore. And more importantly, if he’s a Burst Linker, he must already know our real identities. We can’t just let him do whatever he wants and break our law against abusing the acceleration ability in our home base like this. No matter what it takes, we need to figure out how he keeps from showing up on the matching list and then beat him black and blue in a duel.”
“Exactly! And don’t worry! He can attack you guys all he wants, but I’ll just heal you right up again!”
“……” Digging a deep ravine in the space between his eyebrows, Takumu continued to stare at the floor for a while. But finally, he moved his lips stiffly and a quiet “Thanks” slipped out.
When he brought his face back up, it was wearing his usual unfettered expression. “Got it,” he said in a low, strained voice, after nodding once. “I’ll look into it somehow during practice. Leave him to me for a while, Haru.”
6
However, two days quickly passed with no change at all in the situation.
Haruyuki was desperately focused on trying to learn the faces, names, and personalities of all the students in his homeroom, and honestly he had no extra time for thinking about the matter with Seiji Nomi.
Having for a long time been very bad at hanging out with anyone, to the point that the only people even talking to him were groups of bullies, Haruyuki could not believe how quickly Chiyuri became friendly with several girls. She was already sitting with them at lunch and things. And even Takumu, a transfer student, had melted into the brainy group, chatting with them over lunch, surrounded by torturous equations displayed in 3-D standing models.
Of course, if Haruyuki had asked them to, they would have declined to join their new friends and eaten with him. But the last thing he wanted was for Chiyuri and Takumu to treat him with kid gloves.
So just like in the accelerated world, he had to break free of his shell and get to the point where he could make new friends. Intent on this purpose, he kept his ears open while aimlessly wandering within the local net, attempting to find other guys he might have something in common with. But any and everyone were talking about sports or music or fashion, with not even a mere micro-second of talk about games or anime.
Well, I just have to take my time and keep trying. I mean, technically, I have someone I can eat lunch with. And she’s the most popular person in school.
He really and truly wanted to be as strong as this thought, but this popular person he could technically have lunch with was the vice president of the student council, and she was currently caught up in a whirlwind of busyness dealing with everything that needed to be dealt with before the school trip in a few days. So he didn’t even see her on the net, much less during lunch.
The situation being what it was, the next time Haruyuki got the chance to talk with her was on the Territories’ duel field at the end of the week.
“Eeeyaaah!”
Haruyuki watched Black Lotus’s jet-black right leg kick out at right angles, drawing a beam of blue-purple light as it did.
Cut abruptly in a straight line from waist to shoulder, the enemy close-range attacker shot up into the air, spinning round and round, before it crashed into a building in the distance and stopped moving.
Haruyuki gazed at the team victory display that popped up in front of him and ran over to his Legion Master, relieved that their total win rate for the battles that day was 80 percent.
“Hey, nice work, Silver Crow, Cyan Pile.”
“You, too!”
“Excellent work.” Cyan Pile’s large bulk materialized from the entrance of a collapsed building nearby, only to follow Haruyuki. As he bowed, his voice was quiet. “Please excuse me. I’m right in the middle of my team practice break, so I have to go. Master, do please have fun on your trip to Okinawa tomorrow. Take care.”
They watched Takumu as he said his hurried good-byes and burst out, and then Kuroyukihime laughed quietly.
“He’s so thoroughly a kendo guy. They started him on the regular team right away, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. Well. Anyway, um, about the kendo team.” Haruyuki glanced around to check that the three members of the enemy team and every one of the ten or so people in the Gallery had all disconnected, and then continued in a whisper. “We don’t have any proof yet, but that new seventh grader who joined the regular team with Taku might be a Burst Linker.”
“…What?”
Black Lotus’s violet eyes narrowed, and she brought her swords up to intersect, as if crossing her arms. Haruyuki turned toward her and explained what had happened at the tournament two days earlier.
Kuroyukihime remained silent for several seconds, even after he was finished. Finally, she glanced up and muttered, “Still plenty close,” before seating herself elegantly on some nearby rubble. Haruyuki sat down timidly across from her.
“Nomi…Seiji, hmm? I don’t have any recollection of the older brother, Yuichi. There were no Burst Linkers ahead of me last year or the year before. So even if this Yuichi were Seiji’s ‘parent,’ he must have lost Brain Burst by the time I started at Umesato.”
“In that case”—Haruyuki shook his head, digesting Kuroyukihime’s smooth statement—“if Nomi Seiji’s a Burst Linker, maybe he went to a different school than his parent?”
“It’s rare, but it does happen on occasion. I did it myself, in fact. But before we get to that…Are you certain? That this freshman Nomi accelerated during the tournament?”
“We don’t have any proof. Just— I mean, it’d happen in kendo if it was going to happen in any sport, right? Taku used the Physical Burst command in kendo, too, so I think he totally knew what he was seeing.”
“Hmm.” Black Lotus nodded slightly and let slip a sigh somehow like a wry smile. “But all of this does mean you’ve finally learned of the existence of the physical acceleration command. I won’t tell you not to use it, but you do know that using the command to become a baseball hero or anything of that nature is banned in Nega Nebulus.”
“I-I won’t use it! If I’m going to pay five points for just three seconds, I’d be way better off using ten points to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field. Anyway, the real problem here is the reason why Nomi doesn’t show up on the matching list.”
“It is quite hard to believe, to be honest,” Kuroyukihime murmured, further narrowing both eyes. “A patch was applied after the backdoor program incident six months ago, so it should be impossible now to use the same kind of underhanded trick. If Nomi is a Burst Linker and he’s
connected to the Umesato local net, he has to be registered on the matching list. If he’s not on the list, then that means he’s not connected to the local net.”
“B-but for a student not to be connected to the in-school net while on school grounds…is that even possible? Especially during lessons and kendo tournaments, good Lord!”
“It’s certainly unlikely.” Mirrored black goggles shook gently from side to side at Haruyuki’s rebuttal. “If you infiltrated the local in-school net main server or— No, it’s simply too risky. This might be junior high, but if you were discovered, you’d be expelled. Perhaps…He might be masking himself from other Burst Linkers with some kind of illegal program.”
“It has happened once before,” Haruyuki responded in a low voice, turning his silver helmet to face the ground. “I feel like…that’s the most likely thing.”
“But even if that were it, what’s Nomi’s objective? If he wanted to hide the fact that he’s a Burst Linker, using the Physical Burst command basically does the opposite. This is, indeed, the reason we’re largely suspicious of him. And despite the fact that he’s no doubt got information on our real identities, he doesn’t use it to challenge us to duels. What exactly does he want?”
Haruyuki, of course, had no answer to Kuroyukihime’s question. “I think the only thing we can do is figure out how he’s not appearing on the list, challenge him to a duel, and ask him,” he said, after thinking about it for a while. His tone was uncertain.
“Well…Hmm. For Burst Linkers, everything starts with the duel. I’d like to fight him straightaway, but unfortunately, I’ll be away from Tokyo for a week, starting tomorrow. Perhaps I can fake an illness and stay behind—”
“Y-you can’t do that!!” Haruyuki cried out, waving both arms frantically to stop her from finishing the unthinkable sentence. “Your junior high school trip only happens once in your whole life! Go. The rest of us will work something out with this Nomi thing!!”
“Mmm. You will? But don’t be reckless. Oh right, have you decided what you’d like me to bring you?”
The Twilight Marauder Page 6