The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

by Reki Kawahara

  Instantly, Rin, lying on top of Haruyuki facedown, shuddered.

  Similarly frozen in place as he pulled a tight smile onto his face, Haruyuki managed to squeeze out a reply to the girl—the deputy of Nega Nebulus, Strong Arm Sky Raker herself, aka Fuko Kurasaki.

  “Oh. Y-yeah. Me…too…”

  It’s okay, it’s still okay; this is still not the level of crisis you have to run away from! Because the very person who had ordered Rin Kusakabe currently and admirably holding Haruyuki down was Fuko, and it wasn’t impossible for her to decide to interpret this situation as a logical extension of her own order, and in the end if they could talk about it, she would totally understand—he was completely sure of it. For sure.

  Haruyuki let his thoughts run off earnestly, forgetting that he himself had tried to literally run away from everyone in the Legion.

  However, immediately after that, Chiyuri popped up from Fuko’s left and visually confirmed Haruyuki’s current status.

  Imagining a red overlay flaring up from her feet, Haruyuki shifted his gaze to the door on the opposite side, ready to open it and escape. And there, on the other side of that window, he discovered his Legion Master standing with her arms crossed, and he froze utterly and completely.

  Chak! Kuroyukihime opened the door on the right side and bent forward, her special attack “Kuroyukihime’s Ultra-Cold Smile” ripping across her face for the first time in a long time.

  “Perhaps we’re interrupting, Haruyuki?” she said.

  Being a young man praised for having reaction abilities of the highest level among Burst Linkers, the response Haruyuki managed to calculate and deliver with all the force of his neural circuitry was the following.

  “…I-it’s not what you think.”

  6

  The place was once more the living room of the Arita home on the twenty-third floor of the condo. The time was 7:40 PM.

  Since Operation Castle Escape had started at exactly seven o’clock that day, June 20, 2047, this meant not even an hour had passed in the real world. But for Haruyuki subjectively, it felt as though he had accumulated several days’ worth of events that he still hadn’t processed.

  The escape from the Castle and Suzaku’s fierce attack.

  The search for and discovery of Ash Roller. Summoning the Armor, the slaughter.

  The encounter with the two members of Great Wall. And yet another battle…

  When he had absently retraced his steps to that point, as he sat plopped down in one corner of the sofa set, a mug of café au lait was set down before him, accompanied by a “Here you go.”

  “…Th-thanks…” He thanked Chiyuri in a small voice and picked up the steaming mug to bring it to his lips.

  “Ah! Hawwwwt?!” The instant he sipped at it, the overboiled, scorchingly hot liquid burned his tongue, and Haruyuki cried out in pain.

  But Chiyuri, sitting on the sofa opposite him, touched her own café au lait to her lips with a feigned ignorance. “Oh my, I beg your pardon,” she said crisply.

  Somehow, the cups distributed to everyone else were a suitable temperature, and Haruyuki’s alone had been given plenty of heat in the microwave. But only Takumu clucked his tongue and shook his head with a wry grin at this targeted maliciousness; Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Utai Shinomiya simply turned silently toward their own cups.

  This was not because Haruyuki had locked them all in the house and run off alone, or even because he had summoned the Armor of Catastrophe. It was because of the presence of the seventh person, clutching the hem of his T-shirt tightly with her right hand while she sat to his left, on the verge of tears as always. From the time Fuko had pulled her off him in the underground parking lot until she was brought up to the twenty-third floor in the elevator and sat down on the sofa, she had not let go of Haruyuki’s shirt.

  If, hypothetically, this had been the Red King, Yuniko Kozuki aka Niko, Kuroyukihime would have instantly shouted, Quit fooling around and let go! and might actually have even attacked physically. However, when her opponent was a weak-looking girl who constantly sniffled, tears in her eyes, even the Black King apparently hesitated to take action.

  Only the sound of Haruyuki blowing on his cup broke the urgent silence.

  Finally, Chiyuri set her own cup down. “Leeeeet’s see,” she said in a voice that was half groan, rubbing her temples with the index fingers of both hands. “I don’t understand the situation yet. Actually, I just can’t accept it.”

  Lifting her face, she stared hard at the girl to Haruyuki’s left—the girl sitting directly across from her. “Are you really Ash Roller? The Ash Roller? The hya-ha-ha-haa-mighty-me-mega-luckyyyyy Ash Roller? The Ash with the missiles on his motorcycle?”

  Chiyuri was slightly overemphasizing one aspect in her description, but still, the girl—Ash Roller’s real-world self, Rin Kusakabe—nodded clearly. Rin had already switched out her brother’s old metallic-gray Neurolinker for her own pastel-green one. If he were to believe what she said before, she already could no longer remember the details of the duel with Haruyuki earlier. But even still, she was apparently fully aware of what kind of Burst Linker she—or her brother—existed as in the Accelerated World. Tears dampening both eyes, she apologized in a thin voice.

  “Um, I’m sorry. On the other side. I’m always saying so many. Rude things.”

  “Y-you don’t have to apologize. I talk pretty bluntly in the duels, too.”

  Unconsciously, Haruyuki and Takumu both bobbed their heads up and down, and once she had frozen the awkward pair with her eye laser, Chiyuri continued. “But—I’m not sure how to put this. I’m just a little surprised because I’ve never seen anyone so different between here and over there before. I mean, I can’t believe you can be a girl in the real and have a male-type avatar.”

  The instant he heard these words, Haruyuki this time made momentary eye contact with Fuko, who was seated on the love seat to his right.

  Since he hadn’t explained to Chiyuri and the others Rin’s special circumstances, the only people there who knew all about the girl and her brother and the two Neurolinkers were Haruyuki and Rin’s parent, Fuko. He took the look in her eyes to mean they would watch for the time to explain it all, and so abruptly opened his mouth.

  “Th-that’s just ’cos there’s over a thousand Burst Linkers. It’s not so weird to find someone who seems like an exception sometimes.”

  Chiyuri turned her hard stare on the girl once more, and then looked away abruptly. “I guess so. Like someone who’s all nervous and shy in the real world like this, but then gets all carried away in the Accelerated World and charges on from one thing to the next!”

  “Unh!” He reflexively ducked his head at the unexpected attack. As he sipped at his coffee, finally cooled enough to drink, his brain worked at top speed. His plan to escape alone and resolve this himself was ruined, and given that he had been caught again like this, he wouldn’t be able to shelve the matter forever. He should at least bring it up himself and apologize. In which case, maybe this was that time.

  Haruyuki set his mug down on the glass table in the center of the sofa set and sat up straighter as he took a deep breath. He looked again in turn at the members of his Legion—Kuroyukihime sitting on the far left, Chiyuri and Takumu across from him, Fuko on the right end, and Utai tucked in to his immediate right because of space concerns—and then yanked his head down.

  “Um, about what I did there, I’m really sorry. I don’t expect an apology to get you to forgive me after all this, but—”

  “Do you actually understand why we—why I am angry, Haruyuki?” The clear voice that rang out belonged to Kuroyukihime, who had been silent this whole time. Her fingers intertwined as they rested on her knees, and the swordmaster and Legion head stared at Haruyuki with jet-black eyes.

  “It’s not because you summoned the Armor of Catastrophe and released the sealed Chrome Disaster. Everyone sitting here already understands that you had to do that to save your friends. But you…you shook off the w
ords and hands we reached out to you and tried to punish yourself alone. If…if you had managed to carry out that plan and disappeared to the edge of the Unlimited Neutral Field along with the Armor…”

  Her voice trembled the slightest bit, and Haruyuki felt something squeeze his heart. He unconsciously clutched at the fabric of his T-shirt above his chest.

  Kuroyukihime blinked once, slowly, before turning slightly more reflective eyes on him. “Did you really think that we would have been able to continue fighting without you? You, who never once thought to leave us, not Chiyuri held prisoner by Dusk Taker, not Takumu infected with the ISS kit, not Fuko about to give up on her dream of the sky, not Utai sealed away on Suzaku’s altar—and not even me, hiding in the depths of the local net for two years! Did you really think that we would just cut you loose and forget you?!”

  Her voice gradually increased in volume to become a sharp sword piercing Haruyuki’s heart. But that stabbing was not a cold pain; instead, a sweet, sad, and warm throbbing spread out to fill his chest.

  Biting his lip, head hanging, Haruyuki pushed back the self that tried to cling to that gentle rebuke. “I’m sorry,” he apologized once more in a shaky voice, and quickly continued. “But…but the Four Elements of the old Nega Nebulus and you, Kuroyukihime— Two years ago, you tried to throw yourselves away to protect your friends in the Legion, didn’t you? You tried to let the other Legion members get away by putting yourself alone into a state of unlimited EK on the altars of the Four Gods, didn’t you? I—Before, I thought the time for that had come for me, too. I thought everyone in the Legion would end up with a bounty on their heads…and I wanted to avoid that at any cost, at least.”

  “What are you talking about, Haru?! Only yesterday, you told me that rather than sitting and brooding alone, I should believe in my friends and reach out a hand!” Takumu half shouted.

  Chiyuri, next to Takumu, gently held him back with a hand. His childhood friend’s eyes were completely different from the earlier superpowered fire beam, this time gently urging Haruyuki to continue.

  “Sorry, Taku,” Haruyuki earnestly muttered. “I actually remembered that earlier when I was direct-dueling with Ash—I mean, Kusakabe.” He turned his face back to Kuroyukihime. “And at the end of the duel, Ash said to me that if I was gonna go disappear in the Unlimited Neutral Field somewhere, he’d come with me. And then I realized it: When you lose all your points in the Accelerated World and are pushed to a forced uninstall, it’s only you who has all your memories related to Brain Burst erased. So, like, um…”

  He struggled with how to express this precious thing that he had realized, but here his language processing engine reached its limit, and Haruyuki simply moved his mouth and his right hand.

  “In other words, the death of a Burst Linker doesn’t belong to the person themselves.” From his right, a quiet, calm voice finished his thought—Fuko. “That’s what you mean, yes? Because the Linker forgets they were ever part of Brain Burst, along with who they met in the Accelerated World, what they experienced there, what they were aiming for…Because of that, what really dies…is the him or her inside the people around them, close to them. Only the comrades, friends, and lovers of the person who disappears continue to carry on knowledge of this ‘death’ in their hearts, in their unlimited accelerated time.”

  “…Yes.” Haruyuki nodded deeply, slowly, and started speaking his words himself again. “That’s just it. Which is why…I had the thought that it’s actually impossible to begin with, the idea that you alone disappear—it’s actually not possible in the Accelerated World. Even if I snuck off somewhere and disappeared after losing all my points to an Enemy…at that time, really, the me that lives inside the people around me I care about would disappear, and that would make a scar, or a hole that size…”

  Kuroyukihime kept harsh eyes on him, and he met them first out of the corner of his eye, gradually coming to look directly at her as he spoke his heart in full.

  “Which is why I don’t think that me alone disappearing will fundamentally resolve anything. Because I know now that it might hurt you all about as much as if I became the Disaster and you had to come hunt me. But…but…”

  He clenched his hands into fists as they sat on his knees.

  “Making the Armor of Catastrophe disappear again before the meeting of the Seven Kings on Sunday now that I woke it up is probably—no, ninety-nine percent impossible. After fighting with it in the Unlimited Neutral Field, I’m sure of it. The Armor’s already completely one with Silver Crow. And not just that. I— At this stage, I might already be getting mental interference from the Armor. I mean—I…”

  He was aware that his friends had all opened their eyes a little wider. And he announced to them what he felt himself immediately before he was forced to burst out, when he had been about to set out on a wandering journey together with the Armor of Catastrophe—or rather, the Beast that lived in the Armor.

  “I…had the thought that I didn’t want to erase it with some outside method. If that had to happen, then…at least I wanted to disappear with it. That’s what I thought.” Eyes completely downcast once again, Haruyuki bit his lip hard.

  UI> ARITA. BY “IT,” DO YOU MEAN THE ARMOR OF CATASTROPHE AS AN OBJECT? OR IS IT SOMETHING OR SOMEONE ELSE? Utai Shinomiya asked him gently, in the chat window, as she sat pressed up against him immediately to his right in the narrow space.

  “…That’s…” After hesitating awhile, Haruyuki resolved himself and explained.

  About the two consciousnesses that lived inside the Armor of Catastrophe. The mysterious girl with the canary-yellow armor inside the original Destiny. And the savage instinct to fight that lived within the Enhanced Armament Disaster, that a twisted fate had given rise to—the “Beast.”

  “Chiyu also met the girl, and so I think it’s pretty clear that she’s not a dream I had or some kind of delusion.”

  “Yeah.” Sitting across from him, Chiyuri nodded sharply. “Although I think the world I went to with Haru and Taku, the Brain Burst central server itself, might have been a dream. But the girl we met there was definitely not. I mean, she told us so much stuff that me and Haru didn’t know.”

  “Hmm. A Burst Linker’s consciousness lodged in an object. Or perhaps it functions as a pseudo-intelligence. Considering the power of the Armor to interfere with the mind, it’s not impossible,” Kuroyukihime murmured, a thoughtful look on her face. The dangerous edge in her eyes had faded somewhat as she turned her gaze on Haruyuki again. “Haruyuki. Which was it that you felt you didn’t want to disappear? The unknown female-type duel avatar who helped and guided you? Or the Beast that spurs you to fight?”

  “…Both— No, maybe…maybe the Beast,” Haruyuki muttered, dropping his eyes. “The girl wants the Armor to be completely eliminated, to cut short the cycle of catastrophe that’s been repeating in the Accelerated World. So if I disappeared with it, I don’t think she’d be sad. And…the Beast wants to erase all Burst Linkers other than itself. Of course, I think that’s basically nuts. But if we take what we were talking about before, about a Burst Linker’s death, and apply it to what the creature wants…each time it hunts someone and dispatches them from the Accelerated World, it ends up squirreling that death away in its own memory. If it ended up the last Burst Linker in the Accelerated World like it wants…it would be carrying the deaths, the extinctions of a thousand Burst Linkers, on its shoulders. So, like, the Burst Linkers that disappear would live on inside its memory alone. So then, what on earth does it…why would it…?”

  Drops of water fell onto his clenched fists. He finally realized that they were falling from his own eyes, and he hurriedly moved to rub his face with his right arm.

  Two seconds faster than him, Kuroyukihime leaned forward; slightly ahead of her, Chiyuri was about to offer the nearby box of tissues, but an instant faster than even that, Utai was pulling a handkerchief out of her pocket. But the one who moved even more quickly than these three was the seventh person, snifflin
g to Haruyuki’s left—Rin Kusakabe. She soaked up the tears collecting on Haruyuki’s cheeks with the sleeve of her ivory summer sweater.

  “It’s lonely,” the girl in the same grade remarked, in a fairly weak voice. “By yourself. No one. Should disappear. All alone.”

  “…Oh, yeah. That’s, um.” Haruyuki naturally froze, but Kuroyukihime, Chiyuri, and Utai all also stiffened up with their own individual expressions on their faces.

  What got things moving was a word from the gentle Fuko. “Rin?”

  With just that, Rin Kusakabe jerked her body back up to its original position, but as if making some sort of statement, she clutched at the hem of Haruyuki’s T-shirt in the same way again.

  Still with a complicated look on her face, Kuroyukihime leaned back into the sofa and cleared her throat lightly. “Haruyuki. These feelings of yours…I don’t believe that they come from mental interference from the Armor of Catastrophe as you say. Because that is so like you, so like what the Haruyuki Arita I know would say.”

  Chiyuri, Utai, Takumu, and Fuko all nodded together.

  “And thus, I don’t believe the possibility of purifying the Armor is completely out of the question. Haruyuki. Just once is enough. Will you give me—will you give us a chance?”

  Purify.

  The word meant that they would burn the Beast together with the Armor of Catastrophe, with the special abilities of the shrine maiden of the conflagration Ardor Maiden—Utai Shinomiya. At this point, the power of Utai’s Incarnate, which had melted and buried the protector knight of the Castle’s inner sanctuary in a massive pool of magma, went without saying. With her of all people, it might have been possible to selectively burn away—no, to exorcise—the Armor, even if it had completely fused with Silver Crow. They had indeed taken great pains to get Ardor Maiden back from Suzaku’s altar to carry out that purification to begin with.

  But. The Haruyuki of that moment could not be sure that this was really the only correct solution. He couldn’t remember the details now, but in the distant past—at the dawn of the Accelerated World—there had been a very sad, cruel incident involving that golden-yellow girl, a metal color that looked a lot like Haruyuki, and the layered avatar calling himself the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, Black Vise. The metal color, stained with an excessively deep despair, had caused the Arc Destiny and the longsword Star Caster to fuse and given birth to the Armor of Catastrophe, the Disaster.