The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

by Reki Kawahara

  “Ngh!” Haruyuki’s entire body stiffened unconsciously.

  From the back of the transparent something, a wide, thin film spread out to the sides. No doubt about it: wings. Their span exceeded the fifty-meter breadth of Midtown Tower. The entire creature might have even been larger than the Super-class Enemy guarding the southern gate of the Castle, the God Suzaku.

  The large, transparent wings were tinged with a dim white light. And then in the next instant, a beam of light jetted out from the center of the massive head.

  The intensity of the light was such that Haruyuki’s enhanced vision burned pure white momentarily. The bright line, far beyond a mere laser, contained a terrifying amount of heat and swallowed up Iron Pound’s right fist as it soared forward to smash into the wall of the building. The fist evaporated in short order.

  The laser beam kept going, shooting several hundred meters into the streets of Roppongi. The beam concentrated on one spot for a brief moment, and then there was an incredible explosion, like the impact of a large meteor.

  “Hngk!!” At the same time as the choked cry slipped out of Haruyuki, the Beast also moaned quietly somewhere deep inside the Armor. The shaking that assaulted them was so fierce, it threatened to destroy the Roppongi Hills tower, even though it should have been sufficiently far away. While Haruyuki and Pound braced their feet to ride it out, the Green King alone stood as calm as ever. But Haruyuki caught a glimpse of the tiniest stiffening in even that broad back.

  The strength of the ray of light that the transparent something released to meet the rocket punch far exceeded the level of power any duel avatar could muster up. That was clear from the width and depth of the crater left at the center of the explosion. So it wasn’t a Burst Linker, which meant that it had to be an Enemy. But if that was the case, the power of this Enemy was on par with that of the Four Gods—actually, taking into consideration the fact that its body was transparent, which made it hard to find the right moment to attack, this Enemy could perhaps even be said to rank equal with the Gods.

  But why? Tokyo Midtown was supposedly nothing more than a simple landmark, far from the Castle. Why would such a powerful Enemy be guarding it?

  “You see it?” Haruyuki heard the now-armless Iron Pound whisper nearby. Without waiting for Haruyuki’s reply, he continued, “Its proper name is the Legend class Enemy, Archangel Metatron. The last boss of the massive dungeon beneath Shiba Park. Or least it was.”

  “Meta…tron.” He felt like he had come across the name in games and manga besides Brain Burst, but a large contradiction caught his attention, and he opened his mouth again. “The dungeon’s…last boss? But, I mean, not only is it not underground, it’s up on the top of Midtown Tower…?”

  “I said, it was. Someone moved it. Probably they tamed it.”

  “Tamed…the last boss…Can you even do that?”

  “It’s impossible. Everyone thought so. Until about a week ago, real-world time, when Metatron suddenly appeared on the tower,” Iron Pound said, almost groaning, and then glared at the figure of the “angel,” which had disappeared completely once more.

  “Contrary Cathedral, the massive labyrinth under Shiba Park, is one of the four great dungeons. And just like the name says, it flips internal attributes one hundred eighty degrees when a duel avatar steps on particular panels. From the holiest of sacred stages, Heaven, to the darkest of dark stages, Hell. And then back again. That last boss there, Archangel Metatron, has the totally annoying status of being invisible with a sudden-death attack and impermeable to all attribute damage. Its power weakens only when the dungeon attributes are Hell, and then our attacks can actually hit it…So as long as it’s where it belongs—in the depths of Contrary Cathedral—it’s not such a terrible enemy. I mean, it’s a bit tough, but as long as you step on the control panel for the boss room, you can force Hell attributes to appear whenever you want. At the very least, it’s waaaay easier to fight than the Four Gods at the Castle. But…”

  Having heard this much of Pound’s explanation, Haruyuki finally felt like he was able to see the bigger picture. Without realizing it, he gave voice to a hazy supposition. “But once Metatron gets outside…the Hell stage almost never appears, so…”

  The boxer nodded in a creaking motion. “Completely invincible,” he spat. “You can’t see it, and there’s no way to defeat an Enemy if your attacks can’t hit it. Right now, the area within two hundred meters of the top floor of Midtown Tower there is completely impenetrable; no one can get in. It’s basically a tiny Castle…”

  Naturally, Iron Pound had no way of knowing that Haruyuki and the other members of Nega Nebulus had not more than an hour ago succeeded in their Castle escape mission. But they had been helped by so many coincidences that their success was more miracle than anything else. One wrong step, and he could have easily ended up in a state of unlimited EK with his beloved swordmaster and teacher.

  Once his brain had gotten to this point, he clenched his hands tightly again, and cut off that line of thought. He squelched the smiling faces of his loved ones springing to life in his mind and painted over them with a black brush.

  “So if you get close, and die in an instant, do you stay there in unlimited EK?” he asked in a low voice.

  “No,” Pound replied, without looking at Haruyuki and seemingly oblivious to his momentary inner strife. “You die instantly, but the attack is just too intense. You can’t get that far into the Enemy’s reaction range, so you don’t end up in unlimited EK. If you put everything you’ve got into a dash right after you regenerate, you can just barely make it without taking the next laser. I tested that out myself.”

  An ironic smile spread across the mouth covered by headgear, but soon disappeared.

  “Our king has the greatest defensive power in the Accelerated World, and even he could only last five seconds against that light beam with full Incarnate defenses deployed, so there’s no way someone like me could do much of anything. Anyway, now you know the situation. What we’re waiting for here—and why we stopped you from charging into Midtown Tower.”

  Even after Pound closed his mouth, Haruyuki remained silent for a while. He did indeed finally understand the situation. Iron Pound and Green Grandé had found the pattern in the change, so they were waiting up here on the roof of Mori Tower for the Hell stage that might appear during the next one. Because only in hell did the Archangel Metatron guarding Midtown Tower lose its power and become susceptible to attack. And the reason the Green King had gone so far as to deploy his Incarnate technique Parsec Wall to repel Haruyuki’s flight was…

  “Are you trying to say…that was to save me from Metatron’s instant death attack?” Haruyuki asked, in a dangerous voice.

  Pound shrugged lightly. “If we had known from the start that you—that Silver Crow had gotten so ‘Disasterfied,’ we prob’ly would’ve let you keep going. Save ourselves the trouble, and the points to set a bounty.”

  Haruyuki gritted his teeth tightly, and the Beast roared briefly again. The dark aura rising up from his entire body shimmered and shook, but he suppressed the urge to attack. The hardness of Pound and the Green King had been beaten into him mere moments earlier. They were not opponents he could defeat by slashing wildly.

  “Chances for the Hell stage to appear next increase three days from now in real-world time, on Sunday evening.” Glancing at Haruyuki out of the corner of his eye, Pound waved the remainder of his right arm around in circles as he spoke. “After waiting up here on this roof for nearly three months, we’re tired—no big surprise there. So the king and me are going to log out for a bit. You…at any rate, I’ll just say thanks. Looks like you helped out our Legion members.”

  He stopped speaking for a moment before saying, as if to himself, “You’re seriously a weird one. You’re so deeply Disasterfied, and yet we’re having a conversation like this.”

  “If you’re going to thank me, then you yourself…,” Haruyuki replied, quietly, ignoring the last bit of Pound’s muttering.
But he cut himself off midsentence.

  Pound and the Green King had apparently been waiting here for over three months of inside time for the Change now. If that bout of asceticism was for the purpose of attacking Midtown Tower, it meant that they too were deeply alarmed at the spread of the ISS kits and were working hard in their own way. They already knew that there was no point in smashing the terminals of the lower-level members; they had to destroy the main body.

  “Bush Utan of Great Wall lost once to the temptation of the ISS kit, but he tried to get rid of it of his own volition before. That’s why he was attacked by the kit wearers. So…” Once Haruyuki had gotten this far in his strangled voice, Pound nodded lightly as he turned around.

  “Yeah. The policy of the king and the Legion for this whole thing’s not to just go and pass Judgment on anyone. Most likely, at the meeting of the Seven Kings three days from now, the six Major Legions will agree on a unified policy for dealing with the Incarnate study kits or whatever…Although, naturally, that’ll be after they’ve decided on the number one item on the agenda, the Armor of Catastrophe.”

  The iron boxer finished this little businesslike speech and walked over to the Green King a few meters away. They briefly exchanged words before starting to walk together. They were probably going to take the elevator at the southeast edge of the heliport down into the building, and then use a nearby portal to return to the real world.

  Watching their backs as sure steps took them farther and farther away from him, Haruyuki thought with a mind that was somehow numb. Guided by anger and hate, I summoned the Armor of Catastrophe, and now this time, I really am the sixth Chrome Disaster. I tore apart those six ISS kit users who attacked Ash and Utan. I slaughtered them with an overly strong power that really doesn’t belong to me. I’m basically tracing out the same path as Takumu yesterday. With the darkness generated by the ISS kit, he completely and utterly crushed the PK group Supernova Remnant after they attacked him. What did I say to him then?

  The instant his thoughts made it this far, his own tearful voice was replayed from a great distance in the back of his mind. I know you can fight this black power, too! You can fight it and break it and move forward again! You can, Taku!!

  And then Takumu had stood and faced the darkness hiding inside him, just as Haruyuki had insisted he could: He had brandished his sword and magnificently cut free of the ISS kit parasitizing him.

  I can’t do that, Taku. Looking down at the sinister talons of his own right hand, Haruyuki muttered to himself with a self-deprecating air, There’s not the tiniest bit of strength left in me, separate from this armor…but I’ve fused so deeply with it and the Disaster, maybe I didn’t have any real strength to begin with. The fight with Great Wall’s third-in-command was super hard, and I barely made a mark on the king. So the fourth I saw in the replay, and the fifth, who sent the Yellow King running with one blow, were way stronger. And if even they couldn’t escape the control of the Armor, then there’s no way someone like me’s going to be able to fight back now…

  If Kuroyukihime had been there at that moment, she would perhaps have been exasperated—“Quite the trick there. You turn into Chrome Disaster and become so utterly negative!” But, naturally, he didn’t hear that voice now. Instead, from somewhere near the base of the tail growing out of his back, he heard the Beast speak, words mixed with a howl.

  GRAAAR. YOU ARE THE PERFECT VESSEL BB PLAYER, THE ONE I HAVE SOUGHT FOR MANY YEARS. YOU ARE THE FIRST ELEMENT TO HAVE FOUGHT TO SUCH AN EXTENT SO SOON AFTER FUSING WITH ME.

  What? Haruyuki lifted his hanging head and replied with a thought colored with a wry smile. Are you…comforting me?

  GRAR!! Instantly, a howl thundered explosively in his mind. IF YOU HAVE THE TIME TO OFFER WANTON JESTS, THEN GO AND FIND OUR NEXT PREY!!

  Still, you know, we first had our eyes on Midtown Tower, but we’re not going to be able to attack with any normal means, huh? You saw it, too, that serious laser before.

  RRRRR. IF WE COULD OBTAIN THE THEORETICAL MIRROR ABILITY. OR…

  At some point, he had started having a conversation with the Beast nesting inside of him. And then Haruyuki realized that Iron Pound, who he thought had left a while ago, was standing in front of the elevator tower, staring at him over his shoulder.

  Wondering if he wanted a rematch maybe, Haruyuki shot a glare at him in return, and the boxer moved his truncated right arm as if to say Haruyuki had the wrong idea, before he opened his mouth.

  “Nah, don’t worry about it. My eyes were just playing tricks on me, I guess. For a second, the color of your armor…”

  Reflexively, Haruyuki looked down at his own body, but naturally, all he saw there was the evil form of the Armor. The color was, of course, the shadow-tinged chrome silver.

  “Just forget it,” Iron Pound called to Haruyuki as he lifted his face again, and then shouted, “Listen, Silver Crow! You have three days left in the deferment they gave you! If you don’t completely remove that Armor there from your avatar before Sunday at one PM, the highest bounty in the Accelerated World will be put on you!!”

  “And when it is, make sure you’re the first to come for my head. You want a rematch, don’t you?”

  Not responding to Haruyuki’s retort, Iron Pound turned his back and quickly thrust his left glove up into the air—maybe a sign that he wouldn’t lose the next time? He then followed the Green King into the bloodstained elevator. The box covered in dirty tiles disappeared to the lower floors with an unpleasant slithering sound.

  Left alone on the rooftop of the Deadly Sin stage building, Haruyuki murmured out loud, unconsciously, “Three more days, huh…”

  If he thought about it calmly, that was the rest of his life as a Burst Linker. No matter how strong the Armor—the Enhanced Armament Disaster—might have been, if duelers came after him single-mindedly one after another whenever he was connected globally, his own powers of concentration would soon be exhausted. And you could have the most expensive sports car in the world, but if you drove it half-asleep, you’d get in an accident soon enough—well, the control AI would forcibly take control before that happened. There was nothing so fragile as a Burst Linker who couldn’t concentrate. In fact, basically all the Chrome Disasters, first to fifth, had lost in this way.

  “Hey, what’re we gonna do, Beast?”

  Naturally, it wasn’t as though his rage and urge to destroy had disappeared, but perhaps they had been burned up to a certain extent in the intense fighting with Iron Pound and Green Grandé; right now, resignation, emptiness, and self-loathing, seasoned with a dash of despair, were the stronger emotions in him. He was already annoyed with thinking about this and that, and when he started talking to the creature casually, it quickly responded with thoughts like a flare-up.

  WE MUST GROW STRONGER, MUCH, MUCH STRONGER. STRONG ENOUGH TO EASILY SLAUGHTER AND DEVOUR THE ENEMY, WHETHER THAT BE AN ORIGINATOR OR A PURE COLOR…

  “You sure are full of life, huh?” Haru laughed briefly beneath his visor.

  The Beast—more precisely, the many negative memories and feelings incorporated into the Enhanced Armament Disaster—functioned like a pseudo-intelligence through the special characteristics of the memory medium. And its objective was very simple: Treat all Burst Linkers as enemies, fight them, beat them, devour them. Due to this simplicity, its mental control was very strong. The first, who had given birth to the Armor of Catastrophe itself, and the second and third, had, to greater and lesser extents but without exception, had their minds eaten into by the Armor and been transformed into terrifying berserkers. The number of Burst Linkers their hands had forever banished from the Accelerated World definitely didn’t stop at a hundred.

  In other words, if he thought about it mechanically, currently, more than the ISS kits or the Acceleration Research Society, this Armor of Catastrophe = Beast = sixth Chrome Disaster = Silver Crow was a much more enormous threat, an enemy of the entire world.

  In the final stages of the Hermes’ Cord race two week
s earlier, Haruyuki had summoned the Armor once, and he had not stopped at instantly killing the enemy before his eyes; he had tried to attack even the hundreds of people in the Gallery. He had just barely been pulled back into his original state with Lime Bell’s special attack, but he had felt then that the next time he called the Armor, he probably wouldn’t be able to return to his normal self again. That his own mind would be instantly erased, and he would simply be a presence raging in the darkness.

  And now Haruyuki had actually set foot into that boundary region. He had summoned the Armor a second time, become more deeply fused with it than before. He had indeed let the anger take over and run wild for a time. But something had started to change in the middle of the fight with the difficult Iron Pound and through the great clash with the Green King. He was strangely quiet now, for some reason.

  Was this proof that Haruyuki had already completely become one with the Disaster? Or was it not Haruyuki at all, but some factor within the Armor, on the Beast’s side?

  “Hey, you…So, like, you…,” Haruyuki began saying to the Beast. And yet for so long, all this time, he had thought of it as the terrifying root of all evil, basically a time bomb lurking within his own self. “If you fight your enemy and win, and win and win and keep winning, until you beat the very last one, what’re you going to do after that?”

  For a while, there was no reply. He wondered if maybe the creature hadn’t actually thought about what came after that, but finally, a low roar thundered deep in his head.

  I DO NOT KNOW. IT DOES NOT MATTER. OUR PURPOSE IS SIMPLY TO DESTROY THE ENEMY BEFORE US AND NOTHING MORE.

  “Heh, ha-ha. I guess so.” Haruyuki laughed briefly and nodded.

  Now that had he summoned the Catastrophe of his own will and completely awakened it, there was a strong possibility that even if he turned to Lime Bell’s Citron Call and Ardor Maiden’s Purification, he wouldn’t be able to go back to normal. In other words, just like the Beast, Haruyuki no longer had anywhere to go home to. Because he had no guarantee that the instant he saw the faces of his friends in Nega Nebulus, he wouldn’t lose all reason like he had before and slash at them wildly.