The Twilight Marauder

by Reki Kawahara

  “Then…that’s…?” Raising his head unconsciously, Haruyuki dared to utter the question he really wanted to ask. “That Legion…It wouldn’t happen to be Nega Nebulous? And the person you asked to cut off your legs—”

  “Black Lotus. Stronger, nobler, and kinder than anyone, my only friend.”

  Haruyuki dipped his head at her voice, so still and yet echoing beautifully like a song.

  “That’s exactly…what I thought. You’re somehow like—”

  “It was a long time ago.” Curt words from the bed reached him in the dark, as if to cut him off. “A long, long time ago. Now go to sleep, Corvus. Tomorrow’s going to be an early day.” He heard the sound of her rolling over sharply, as if to refuse any further conversation.

  I still have questions. About the past, about her.

  But an incredible weight pressed down on his eyelids, and Haruyuki entrusted himself to the warm darkness that visited him, sinking endlessly into the deep abyss of sleep.

  The next moment, his head slammed into the floor. He opened his eyes reluctantly.

  What the hell? I just laid down; who yanked my pillow out from under me? he thought as he raised his upper body. But his eyes flew open in surprise at the sky on the other side of the curtains, now open wide: It was dyed a beautiful orange and purple.

  “Huh?! It’s already morning…?!”

  “It is. Good morning, Silver Crow.”

  Turning his face toward her voice, Haruyuki saw Sky Raker return to her bed the pillow he was convinced had been yanked out from under his head. She had already put on her white hat and dress.

  “G-good morning.” He returned the greeting and asked, “Um, what time is it?”

  The sky-blue avatar pointed silently toward the kitchen. A small brass clock sat in the display case on the wall, the hands of which were pointing at five in the morning. Considering the fact that they had laid down right after the sun set the previous night, he calculated that he had slept a full ten hours, but he felt as if he hadn’t even been asleep long enough to dream.

  However, the inside of his head did feel refreshed, like he had splashed himself with cold water. In fact, this was actually the most refreshed he could ever remember feeling upon waking. And in the real world, only thirty seconds or so had passed.

  “I get it. Sleeping here, that’s a pretty good way to use your points,” he hummed without thinking, and Sky Raker grinned.

  “Although you run the risk of someone killing you in your sleep.”

  “…Huh?”

  “You’re much too late to try and save that head now. I called you five times and you still didn’t wake up.”

  So that’s why you pulled that dirty pillow-snatching trick. Nodding his agreement, Haruyuki shrank into himself. “I-I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to wake up next time!”

  But Sky Raker returned only a mysterious smile and rolled her wheelchair toward the door.

  The Unlimited Neutral Field in the early morning shone with a beauty different from that of dusk. Although the affiliation was still Wasteland, the reddish-brown, rocky mountains were lit up by the morning glow, turned into colossal chunks of raw ruby.

  The wheelchair creaked along the lawn wet with morning dew, approached the same bench on the north side as where they had talked the day before, and stopped. Haruyuki moved forward to her side and waited for Sky Raker to speak standing up this time.

  The level-eight Burst Linker, former Nega Nebulus member, and current hermit of the accelerated world took a deep breath before beginning, in a voice that was a fair bit sterner. “Silver Crow. We will now begin the Incarnate training.”

  “Y-yes. I await your instruction.” Haruyuki dropped his head in a deep bow.

  This training alone, learning to use the Incarnate System to control his avatar through nothing but images, was the sole hope left to him. It might take several days, several weeks, but he would master it.

  Burning with resolve, a soundtrack like something out of a Hong Kong kung fu movie’s training montage playing in his brain, Haruyuki awaited her first instruction.

  However.

  “That said, the essential point of the will can be expressed in a single word. Anyone can use the system once they understand this word.”

  “…O-okay?” His knees buckled at Sky Raker’s smooth voice. “J-just one…? And then your initiation into the secret art is complete?”

  “It is.”

  “Please tell me what it is,” he said, naturally enough.

  “Of course. The next time you are able to come see me,” was the response he got, so he hurriedly took a step closer.

  “N-no, I won’t go back to the real world until you tell me!”

  “I didn’t say ‘decided to come see,’ I said ‘able to,’ didn’t I? In other words—” She cut herself off and beckoned him closer, so Haruyuki took another step toward her. The sky-blue hair swung, and the elegant avatar gently touched her right hand to Haruyuki’s back.

  “This is what I’m talking about.” She shoved him to the side.

  “Huh? Oh! Oh oh!” Haruyuki tottered two steps along the lawn. The third step took him into thin air.

  “…Huh?”

  “I pray for your health, Corvus.”

  The figure of Sky Raker smiling sweetly above him quickly receded. More correctly, Haruyuki’s body plummeted through the sky from the peak of the three-hundred-meter-tall tower.

  “Huh? H-hey! Ah!”

  He hurried to flap his arms like wings, but naturally, this had no effect. Dragged down by the virtual gravity, he plunged in free fall straight down.

  “Ah! Aaaaa—”

  Haruyuki died.

  11

  An hour later, he was resurrected.

  Dying in the Unlimited Neutral Field was an entirely bizarre thing. The scene around you changed to a monotonic black and white; your body became see-through like smoke; and, although you could move, at least in a haphazard way, you couldn’t get any farther than about ten meters from the spot where you died. Tiny digital numbers carved out a countdown in the center of your vision, and when they made it all the way to zero from 60:00:00, the field finally recovered its color and your avatar its substance.

  Haruyuki looked down on the fairly decent-size crater he had made and noted out loud, “There is absolutely no doubt that she was Kuroyukihime’s friend.” Then he put both hands on his hips and looked up at the vertical stone wall soaring up before him—the old Tokyo Tower.

  “So then by, ‘if I am able see her again,’ she meant…she meant…”

  Climb to the top of the tower. That’s what she meant, huh?

  After giving his head a quick shake, he sighed heavily. There was that whole bit about pushing the baby birds out of the nest to teach them to fly, but that only ended up a success story if the babies managed to survive the fall.

  But unlike birds, Haruyuki’s avatar had two dexterous hands. And his body was as light as possible, and powerful enough to drill into rock.

  “Guess I’ll get climbing,” he muttered, as if telling himself to get doing just that, and then clenched his fists.

  Even if it were a stone wall that continued straight up for three hundred meters, it wasn’t as though the surface were perfectly slippery-smooth like glass. There were countless gaps where it looked like he could stick his hands and feet, and he should be able to dig out small holes at least.

  Steadying his resolve, he crouched slightly and readied his right fist at his hip.

  “Hnyaaagh!” With a fierce cry, he shot a straight punch forward.

  The blow dug deep into the reddish-brown rock, carving out an indentation about twenty centimeters in diameter. He stuck in his right foot and raised his body up, grabbing hold of a fissure just within the reach of his left hand.

  He ran his eyes from side to side and mentally traced out his route. He yanked his avatar up with just his left hand, then set the tip of his left foot firmly on a slight ledge that he had his eye on.

  If th
e truth be told, this wasn’t exactly the first time he was rock climbing like this in a virtual space. In shooting games where you carried a rifle and ran around the jungle or some mountain region, crawling up the side of a cliff like this and catching the enemy team off guard was a great strategy. So to adopt this fighting technique, Haruyuki had even borrowed VR rock-climbing training software from the library.

  The secret to free climbing was to first clearly visualize the optimal route. And then not to cling too much to the rock. Haruyuki peered as far ahead as he could see and continued scaling the tower at a steady pace, planning in detail where he would put each of his four limbs.

  Almost as if it were competing with him, the red sun in the eastern sky gradually rose above his position. The morning glow disappeared at some point, and the sky became a foreboding yellow.

  He already no longer had any idea of how many holds he had grabbed onto. The peak melted into the sky, almost beyond the limits of his vision, and if he had looked down, the ground should have been disappearing from view below him. But he did not look down at his feet once; keeping his face turned to the sky, he simply, wholeheartedly attacked the cliff. He had almost no awareness of himself, and there was no doubt that this concentration when it came to any and all games was essentially the sole and greatest ability of the human being named Haruyuki Arita.

  These honed nerves captured a faint, distant vibration transmitting through the air: an omen of the sudden gusts that were a feature of the Wasteland stage. Instantly, Haruyuki thrust both hands into fissures in the rock, pressed his body flat up against the wall surface, and held on tightly.

  A few seconds later, the atmosphere roared and shook, and a strong wind, the breath of a giant, assaulted Haruyuki and threatened to shake him loose. But still not feeling much in the way of fear, he calmed himself and waited for the wind to stop. To start with, Silver Crow’s slim, smooth body completely lacking of any protrusions didn’t offer much in the way of air resistance. So he felt sure he wouldn’t be blown away by this much wind, and, in fact, that turned out to be the case.

  When the grumpy giant finally gave up, Haruyuki let out a tiny sigh and resumed his ascent.

  It was around the time the sun had arrived directly above him and was starting to incline a little to the west. The tip of the rock wall, which had seemed to extend infinitely, finally cut a crisp arc in the sky: the tip of the cylinder, i.e., the peak where Sky Raker was waiting.

  It was still more than a hundred meters away. But at this pace, he should be able to reach it before nightfall. And thinking about it now, Sky Raker telling him to make sure to remember the taste of the stew, and her smile when he said that he would definitely wake up the next morning, were probably because she had anticipated him not being able to finish climbing the old Tokyo Tower in a single day.

  I’ll reach the peak today and show her! Haruyuki decided to himself, and he tackled the rock face with sure movements, without letting his guard down. The squalls, which had changed direction in the afternoon, assaulted him with increasing frequency, but Haruyuki glued himself to the wall and weathered them all.

  The color of the sky gradually deepened, and the ascent that had started with the dawn started to come round on nine hours. As he began to feel an equivalent exhaustion and gritted his teeth determinedly, Haruyuki’s nose captured the faint scent of flowers. And then his ears caught the burbling of the spring, and his eyes made out even the faint blue light of the portal.

  A little farther. Twenty—no, fifteen more meters.

  If he could climb the whole way on his first try, even Sky Raker would probably be surprised. Haruyuki grew enthusiastic and picked up his pace.

  And then.

  A high-frequency buzz that he had never felt before shook the air like a howl. A sound, like an infinite number of individual bells rung all at once, came from off in the distance, and Haruyuki lifted his face with a gasp, shooting his gaze over to the horizon in the east. And then he wailed, “Ah! Crap!”

  What he saw on that horizon was the shining of an aurora pouring from the sky to slowly caress the earth.

  The Change. The super massive phenomenon that transformed the affiliation of the entire Unlimited Neutral Field.

  Haruyuki yanked his face back and started scaling the wall at double the speed he had been doing to that point. He slipped sometimes, causing him to break out in a cold sweat, but each time, he narrowly managed to shove his fingers into a gap and grab hold. Without waiting for the pounding of his heart to subside, he leapt once again upward to the next hold.

  As if to hurry him along even more, the aurora approached from the east at an incredible speed, the sound of bells growing steadily louder. The reddish-brown Wasteland color of the earth scattered under the embrace of the seven-colored curtain of light, and the land was reborn in a new form. The world was refreshed.

  After the Change, any defeated Enemies would be replaced and any stage destruction would be repaired. There were no Enemies in the vicinity of the tower; his problem was the latter issue. If he was caught up in the aurora, the holes that Silver Crow’s sharp hands had carved out of the rock wall would probably—

  “Wh-whoa!” Haruyuki shouted, and he tried to climb up the final stretch essentially crawling on all fours. However, he didn’t make the remaining five meters.

  The sound of countless bells overwhelmed his ears; the shining of seven hues painted his vision; and in the next instant, Haruyuki’s hands and feet were forcibly flicked off the wall by some repulsive force.

  “Dammit! Nooooo!” Flapping in midair, he tried once more to grab hold of the wall, but his efforts were in vain.

  “Aaaaaa—”

  Haruyuki died again.

  When he was resurrected an hour later, the world was blanketed by evening, and it was no longer the red Wasteland.

  The surface of the ground was a tight, systematic pattern of paving stones. And the old Tokyo Tower before his eyes had transformed into a steel spire, covered with overlapping metal plates shining blue-black. A Demon City stage.

  Haruyuki sighed heavily, clanking as he sat down on the hard stone paving. If this had been a regular game, he would be beating the hell out of his pillow in his own room to distract himself, but he couldn’t log out now, and he didn’t have the energy for that anyway.

  But he had managed to make it almost all the way to the top on his first try. Sky Raker had been talking like this training would take several weeks or even longer than that, if it went badly. Taking that into consideration, he should chalk this one up as a job well done. He clenched both fists tightly. Next time, I’ll make it all the way for sure.

  He really wanted to set out again right away, but he thought a night climb was probably impossible. He decided to tackle it the second it started to get light in the morning, and after slipping into a suitable building in the area, Haruyuki laid down in one corner of a room that seemed safe.

  Maybe it was a reaction to having concentrated so intently for nine hours straight, but he was suddenly overcome by a powerful drowsiness. Haruyuki dropped hard into sleep, without even a second to feel the emptiness of his stomach.

  But the morning of the third day since he had dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field, Haruyuki peeled his eyelids all the way back at the sight before him.

  The day before, he carelessly hadn’t noticed that the old Tokyo Tower in the Demon City stage was made up of nothing but the same smooth, hard steel plates as Sunshine City when he had fought Chrome Disaster. It had no windows and no stairs. In fact, he couldn’t even find a single indentation where he could hook a finger. Which was to say, there wasn’t anything at all in the way of a handhold for him to climb.

  “Then I’ll just have to make some holes,” he muttered, and rapped on the steel material with his fingertips. Just as he had the day before, Haruyuki hit the wall as hard as he could with his clenched fist.

  And then jumped up with a cry of pain.

  “Ow! Owwwww!”

  He cr
adled his right hand, jumped up and down at the intense pain—amplified to twice that of the lower field—and stared at the place he had just punched, but there wasn’t even a dent in the blue-black wall. An indestructible object— That might not have been the case, but unless you used a heat beam or a drill, you probably weren’t going to have any luck digging a hole in it. And, naturally, Silver Crow was not equipped with such tools.

  “So then that means I have to wait for the next Change…?” He gritted his teeth and cursed, but he had absolutely no idea if the next aurora would come several days later, nor if the next tower would be destructible. Haruyuki dropped to his knees in sudden frustration.

  Out of the blue, something hit his head with a thunk.

  “Wha?!”

  He jumped backward, stunned, and saw that his assailant was wrapped in white fabric. He glanced up, but there was just the steel-colored spire stretching infinitely up toward the gray sky; he could see no one.

  However, Haruyuki didn’t doubt that this package had been dropped by Sky Raker’s hand. Still dumbfounded, he picked it up and undid the knot to find a large, round bun inside, and a small piece of paper, too.

  Instantly, a virtual sensation of hunger assaulted him, and Haruyuki, vexed by the slow pace of the lower half of his helmet sliding up with a whine, bit into the large pastry. It was just a regular bun with nothing inside, but even still, this faintly warm, fragrant thing was absurdly delicious to him, and he devoured it in a trance.

  After polishing off half of the bun, he finally flipped the piece of paper over and read the words written there in elegant handwriting.

  “The Incarnate training has begun. Think about why you were not sent flying by the wind yesterday.”

  “Huh?” He gleaned essentially nothing from this single reading.

  Haruyuki had understood the climbing of this wall to be a sort of basic training before the start of the actual Incarnate System training. In kung fu movies and things, you had to intently scrabble up the levels before the old master would teach you the way of the fist, after all.