The Twilight Marauder

by Reki Kawahara

  Taking a shallow breath, Haruyuki reflexively dropped his eyes to his feet. However, Ash Roller’s cutting words continued. “I mean, you duel long enough and you see all kinds of shit, man. Including people losing their power. But, y’know, your wings aren’t the sort of thing where you can just, like, give up on the sneak attacks or something for having lost ’um. You keep fighting half-assedly like this and just disappear, all those guys who looked up, all this time, to watch you flying up there…All of us…” Ash Roller kicked fiercely at the ground, almost as if he couldn’t get the rest out.

  Head still hanging, Haruyuki murmured quietly in his heart, I don’t want to give up, you know. But my wings…After my flight ability has been deleted from the system, what is there I can do?

  “It’s true my attitude in that duel wasn’t great,” he somehow managed to choke out, slowly raising a leaden head. “But…what does that have to do with this?”

  “Uh, oh…That’s the thing…I mean—”

  “Corvus.” He heard the quiet voice of Sky Raker, Ash Roller’s parent, silent up until that point. “Ash was merely thinking that perhaps I could assist you in getting your wings back.”

  “Huh?” Haruyuki’s eyes opened wide, as did his mouth. “M-my wings…? Assist…But Ash, you’re Green Legion—”

  “Oh! Right! Sorry!!” Ash Roller cried, throwing himself into the motorcycle seat with a thump. “Listen! Don’t get the wrong idea!! Now you owe me! This is serious strategy here! A secret operation to raise your popularity parameters and get you to betray the Black Legion, jerk! Yeah! I am mega coooooooool!!”

  “That’s vulgar, Ash.” Sky Raker’s quiet voice snapped at the skull rider, who was waving the raised middle finger of his right hand.

  “Yes! I’m sorry, Master! Th-th-then I’ll just be getting on excusing myself, yes!” He revved the engine loudly, and the American motorcycle plunged toward the spring in the center of the lawn, jumped high at the water’s edge, and leapt into the glittering blue portal—

  And disappeared.

  More stunned than he had ever been, Haruyuki stood stock-still and somehow managed to mutter, “A secret operation’s…pointless…”

  Sky Raker giggled. “Other than the way his brain works, the way he talks, and the way he looks, he’s a pretty decent kid.”

  What is there other than that? Haruyuki reflexively wondered for a few seconds, and then pushed Ash Roller out of his mind and took a few steps toward the silver wheelchair stopped near the spring.

  A veritable mountain of questions swirled around in his heart as he timidly opened his mouth, still stuck on which one to ask first. “Uh…um…Ash said this, but. He said you were the person in the accelerated world who’d come closest to the sky…”

  At this, Sky Raker’s smile became transparent somehow, and she nodded. “I suppose I would be the representative of those Burst Linkers who can never fly no matter how much they want to, who Ash was talking about. No, I guess I shouldn’t say that I couldn’t fly. It’s just that, in the end, these hands didn’t reach the sky.”

  Haruyuki unthinkingly winced at this response, which he had anticipated to a certain degree. In that case, she actually should be telling me off instead of trying to help me, he reflected, but he couldn’t stop himself from jumping at the single thread of hope glimmering faintly before him.

  Blinking, he raised his gaze and uttered his next question in a hoarse voice. “Then…is it true…? That you can get my wings back…?”

  This time, the answer didn’t come right away. The avatar gently brushed aside dazzlingly lustrous sky-blue hair and stared at Haruyuki for a while.

  “That’s impossible,” she said crisply.

  “What…”

  “When you lose something from your duel avatar, there is a reason you had to lose it. Here in this place, I have no means of negating that reason.”

  “……”

  His faint hope instantly cut down, Haruyuki started to hang his head, crestfallen. But just as he was about to tear his gaze away, Sky Raker casually lifted the hem of the white dress she wore, and his eyes popped open.

  “Please take a look.”

  What he saw—or rather didn’t see—was from the avatar’s knees down. The round knee joints drew a supple line up to the thin thigh area, but the calves that should have stretched out below them were nonexistent on both legs.

  Perhaps he should have considered the idea that there was something wrong with her legs when the avatar came out in a wheelchair. But what would cause the legs of a duel avatar to disappear?

  It was true that during duels, you could take damage through the loss of limbs for whatever reason. Haruyuki himself had lost arms and legs in fierce battles a countless number of times. But once the duel was over, the loss was immediately canceled, and you were back to brand-new in the next battlefield.

  Haruyuki held his breath and, unable to avert his eyes, was forced to wonder, Maybe Sky Raker, too…?

  Maybe she had her legs taken from her forever by Nomi, aka Dusk Taker, or another Burst Linker with the same ability?

  But the next words from her mouth refuted that idea.

  “I chose to cut them off myself.”

  “What…?!”

  “I decided that I no longer needed legs, and I had a certain person cut them off for me. Understanding the whole time that it was the height of arrogance, egotism—no, madness. Since then, no matter how many times I dive into the accelerated world, my legs have never returned. Which means…even now inside me, the embers of madness smolder. As long as they do, my legs will remain like this.”

  Sky Raker stared closely at Haruyuki, rooted to the spot, with eyes the color of dawn, and pronounced softly, “Your wings are the same. If you do not face the reason that led to their loss and overcome it, you will most certainly never get them back.”

  Reason.

  In other words, Nomi/Dusk Taker’s special attack, Demonic Commandeer.

  No, that wasn’t it. It was the defeat itself. Unless Haruyuki got past the pain of defeat etched so deeply into his heart at being forced to yield to Seiji Nomi in every way, he would never be able to get back his wings. That’s what it was.

  But overcoming that was absolutely impossible. Because Haruyuki had lost his lone ability, the power of flight, and Nomi, who had taken it, possessed at that very minute its capacity to fly freely. Haruyuki didn’t have a hope of beating him.

  He dropped to his knees on the lawn unconsciously, and Sky Raker threw him an unexpected line.

  “No matter what we do in this garden, your wings won’t come back. But I didn’t say you wouldn’t be able to fly, Corvus.”

  Let’s sit down before we talk about the rest.

  The self-driving wheelchair started to move with a squeal, so Haruyuki followed, seriously confused.

  White benches were installed at the edges of the round garden in the sky, each at a cardinal direction. They were the type with no backrest, only a seat, so that you could sit facing either way. Sky Raker brought her wheelchair to a stop next to the northern bench, facing outward, and Haruyuki shyly sat next to her. When he lifted his face, he gasped at the spectacular sight before him: an unbroken view of the heart of Wasteland Tokyo, three hundred meters below.

  The government district area in Nagata-cho had changed into immense ruins hewn from red sandstone. The Shuto Expressway curved across the chasm, supported by an arch of piled stones. Even farther off stood a vivid red castle, remarkably majestic in appearance: the Imperial Palace in the real world. No matter what the stage was, that always existed as an enormous castle, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brimming with an unearthly aura.

  As Haruyuki idly wondered if anyone lived there, Sky Raker broke the silence.

  “I had thought I might like to meet you, Silver Crow.”

  “Huh…oh, th-thanks,” he stammered, pulling in his shoulders.

  Watching him, the sky-blue avatar radiated a lingering, gentle smile before continuing softly. “Seven y
ears have passed since the foundation of the accelerated world, and finally a flying ability appears. When Ash told me about you, I was deeply surprised and also greatly interested. I thought, what kind of spirit…what kind of wounded psyche’s scars could realize a power so great as to cut free of the tremendous gravity of this world?”

  “No, it’s— I-I’m sorry. My scars are really nothing big at all.” Making his body even smaller, Haruyuki shook his head in short bursts. “In the real, I’m just fat and bullied and wishy-washy…Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s kind of presumptuous to call that kind of thing a mental scar.”

  Even bewildered as he was at himself for telling this to a Burst Linker he had just met—a Burst Linker who was closer to being an enemy than a friend—the words tumbled smoothly and mysteriously from his lips.

  Sky Raker smiled again and shook her head gently.

  “The mental scars that Brain Burst reads from the owner’s unconsciousness and uses as a resource for the duel avatar do not necessarily indicate only the strength of anger or resentment.”

  “Huh…? B-but, I mean, scars, that’s like feelings of failure, right?”

  “True, but those are not everything. Duel avatars generated from an enormous loss—say, a seething anger—without exception, manifest this power as a simple destructive force. Like with that Chrome Disaster, which brought such monumental calamity to the accelerated world.”

  Hearing that name, Haruyuki took a sharp breath. It had only been a few months prior that he had been trembling right down to the marrow of his bones in the presence of the Armor of Catastrophe, Chrome Disaster, and its terrifying attack power. It was an Enhanced Armament, but it definitely seemed to be stained with thoughts of extreme anger.

  “And avatars with malice as their source acquire midrange fighting abilities like a curse, while avatars created from despair often become self-destructive types, hurting themselves to defeat their enemies. But you do know that not all avatars house destructive powers like this?”

  “…Yes.” Now that she was saying it, that was exactly it. Haruyuki’s wings were not a direct attack power, and Ash Roller’s bike was the same. However, in that case, what exactly was this “wounded psyche—”

  “The wound, in other words, is a lack,” Sky Raker replied, almost as if reading Haruyuki’s mind. “A hole in the heart where something important is missing. You have this futile hole, and you get angry, you resent it, you despair—or you reach out your hand for the heavens again. That choice determines the nature of your avatar.”

  “Reach…your hand?”

  “Exactly. In other words, hope. A wounded psyche is also the flip side of hope,” Sky Raker said crisply, and then raised her face to stare directly into Haruyuki’s eyes from under her white hat. “Silver Crow. You must have had more hope for the sky in your heart than any other Burst Linker who came before you. The strength of your desire to aim for the sky gave birth to the flying ability, to wings. Do you see? It isn’t that because you had wings, you could fly. Just the opposite. Because you could fly, you gave concrete form to your wings.”

  “Because…I could fly…,” Haruyuki murmured hoarsely, and after repeating this several times in his heart to try and understand what it meant, he twisted up his face under his silver mask and shook his head vehemently. “That’s—that’s ridiculous. If you could fly just through the force of your will…Are you saying that those wings were just for show?”

  “Taking it to the extreme, that’s exactly it. Due to some kind of phenomenon, your wings and your flying ability in the system have been taken from you in the form of a removed object. But that doesn’t mean that the force of will that is the source of that ability has been. Because, no matter what the special ability or avatar, taking that is impossible.”

  “No way…What you’re saying, it’s not possible!” Haruyuki threw his head down and clutched both knees tightly. “Even if I did have this desire to fly in my heart, it would just be…a trigger. Brain Burst read it, and then made those wings and their flying ability for me. So in this world, the ability itself is reality! U-unless I get it back, I’ll never…” Haruyuki nearly howled, tightening his grip on his knees so much that his fingers were almost creaking.

  For a while, only the wind sounded, blowing past at three hundred meters above the ground. Stretching toward the sky from the edge of the garden, the flowers in front of him—the names of which he did not know—rippled and scattered petals soundlessly.

  “In other words, what you’re saying is this.” Sky Raker’s voice rode to him on the wind, unchanged. She was still quiet after Haruyuki’s anguished outburst, but her voice was tinged with a faint echo of humor. “That in this accelerated world, the force of your will and such are meaningless. That the numerical data prescribed and calculated by the system alone determine any and all phenomena.”

  “…But I mean, it is. We’re in the middle of a VR game. You’re saying there’s something other than digital data.”

  “This wheelchair.”

  Her sudden, seemingly unconnected statement made Haruyuki yank his face up.

  “Look at it closely. This is not a separate Enhanced Armament. It’s just an object, just as it looks, assembled from a chair and wheels. I’m sure, however, you saw earlier that it drives itself?”

  “Y-yes,” Haruyuki replied, bewildered all the while, not seeing the true meaning of the question. “It’s equipped with some kind of propulsive device, isn’t it? A motor or something somewhere.”

  There’s obviously something. I mean, it drove all by itself. She probably has a small controller in her hand, he thought, craning his neck to run his eyes over the slender silver wheels. His eyes flew open as the enormous shock of realization hit him.

  There was nothing. He couldn’t see any motor-type parts at all, not on the thin axle, not on the hubs, not on the rims. So then maybe some kind of injection-type device? He peered around at the back, but there was no nozzle or anything similar anywhere.

  “B-but, I mean. Before, it moved by itself,” Haruyuki muttered in blank amazement, and Sky Raker gently spread her thin hands out to the sides. Neither contained a trace of anything controller-like.

  The wheelchair on which she sat perfectly still slowly rolled backward, wheels creaking.

  “…N-no way.”

  Creak, creak. The chair pulled even farther back and suddenly began twirling on the lawn, before gracefully sliding back and forth and side to side, almost like a figure skater on ice. Finishing its brief dance, the chair stopped neatly, in exactly the same position as before.

  “How was that?”

  “How was that…?” Haruyuki’s shoulders shook and his eyes were as far open as they could get.

  It shouldn’t move. This world created by the Brain Burst program was so faithful to authenticity that it could even be said to be another reality. All machines required a motive device, and all motive devices required an energy source. For instance, Ash Roller’s bike had gasoline in the tank, and the drive wheel spun because of a chain connected to the engine. Which was exactly why, when Haruyuki lifted the rear wheel during their duel, the bike had no longer been able to move. In some other game, the bike almost certainly would have dashed ahead with just the front wheel, with no regard for how drive systems work. So this wheelchair propelling itself without any driving noise or injection light whatsoever—

  “It can’t be…There’s no way. What…Exactly what force is moving that chair?” Haruyuki asked, gasping.

  A serene smile graced the small mask of the duel avatar whose hair was the color of the sky. “My will,” she replied.

  “Huh…?!”

  “I moved it with nothing more than the power of my will.”

  “B-but-but-but!” Haruyuki shouted, stammering like a corrupt sound file, so floored by this that his heart nearly leapt from his mouth. “Th-that’s almost. Almost…like ESP, isn’t it?! S-so then, that’s the ability ‘Psychokinesis’…or…?”

  Here, the smile turned bi
tter, and Sky Raker shook her head loosely. “Ha-ha-ha, it isn’t that. This world…whether it’s the normal duel field or the Unlimited Neutral Field, every Burst Linker fighting in the accelerated world has this power.”

  “Wh-what?!”

  “Please think about it. You were able to fly freely in the sky when you had wings. Isn’t that so?”

  “Y-yes…”

  “But how exactly did you control those wings? After all, the real you does not have wings.”

  He blinked successively at the question, one he had never considered before. “Th-that was…” Haruyuki responded hesitantly, unconsciously moving his shoulders. “A movement in my shoulder blades…”

  “If you were doing that, you wouldn’t be able to fully swing your fist while flying. Please try to remember. Even if you weren’t aware of it, you were controlling your flight with the power of your will. Am I wrong?”

  “……”

  Even at a total loss for words, he still was struck with a thought: Now that you mention it…It was true that as Silver Crow, he moved both hands like crazy and could just take off on the spot, without running into the takeoff. And now that someone was asking what kind of physical movements he made when he did, the answer was—none.

  But he still had trouble swallowing Sky Raker’s explanation. “The power…of my will,” he began, shaking his head sharply. “But, I mean, that’s, how would it read that? The Neurolinker doesn’t have a function like that…It’s not supposed to—”

  And then Kuroyukihime’s voice from long ago reverberated in his ears: Neurolinkers also have the ability to access things other than the sensory or movement regions of our brains.