The Seven-Thousand-Year Prayer

by Reki Kawahara

  The ones who had pushed Saffron Blossom and Chrome Falcon into that cruel trap and created the opportunity for the Armor of Catastrophe to appear were precisely Black Vise and the Acceleration Research Society. Could he sever the cycle of tragedy looping over the seven years of real-world time since then—or would he be caught by the Society and turned into their trump card?

  Here was that watershed. The moment of victory or defeat.

  “Graaaaar!!” A sinister howl surging out of him, Haruyuki used his left hand to pull the blackish-silver longsword out of the ground nearby and up into the air.

  Without a moment’s delay, he stretched out his right arm and tightly grabbed hold of the slender neck of Black Lotus, still lying motionless on the ground.

  I’m sorry, Kuroyukihime! I’ll apologize later, so, so much!!

  Sword secured in his left hand and the Black King in his right, Haruyuki threw his whole body back and howled again.

  “Gra…aaaaaaah!”

  His long tail twisted, and he spread out the metal wings on his back. He kicked fiercely at the paving stones and took to the air. On a spiraling trajectory, he aimed for the golden sun spanning the western sky. What was important was distance and angle. Keeping an eye on Mori Tower in one corner of his field of view, he flew thirty meters or so before settling into a hover.

  Perhaps roused by the sudden change in gravity, bluish-purple eye lenses flickered faintly beyond Black Lotus’s cracked goggles.

  Haruyuki stared down at the Black King, eyes desperate beneath the visor that was modeled after the maw of a carnivorous animal. A voice on the verge of disappearing touched Haru’s hearing.

  …Haruyuki…?

  Kuroyukihime! Kuroyukihime!!

  Earnestly fighting his tug-of-war with the raging Beast as it tried to wrest back control of the avatar, Haruyuki returned the thought with everything he had. After I hurt you like this, you probably won’t believe a word I have to say. But right now, just for this moment! Please trust me!!

  And then he felt like the Black King smiled faintly…What. Are you talking about…? I’ve always trusted you. Up to now…and from now on, too…Forever…

  These words spilled into Haruyuki’s mind and glittered like multicolored gems, and a passion so powerful it threatened to drive him mad filled his heart. He wanted to throw away the sword in his left hand and hug Kuroyukihime to him. But doing that would be the end of everything. He still had a job to do. To undo the curse of the Armor and end the chain of sadness, he had to make those two meet one more time.

  “Graaa…aaaaaah!!” Haruyuki made a remarkably fierce roar ring out through the eternal twilight, and twisted the longsword he clutched in his left hand to face him, brandishing it high.

  To anyone looking up and watching from below, the action would have looked like nothing more than the sword in his left hand going to pierce the avatar he held fast in his right. And because his back was completely turned to the tower, the point of the sword would have been hidden by the large extended wings of the avatar, and thus be invisible.

  He held his breath, concentrated every ounce of willpower he could muster—the positive Incarnate that could be called a prayer or wish—in his left hand and brought the sword down.

  The sharp tip passed to the side of the Black King’s body, merely brushing up against it, and lightly pierced the center of the Armor of Catastrophe—toward Haruyuki’s own heart.

  DO YOU BETRAY US?! EVEN YOU?! YOU BETRAY AND TRY TO DESTROY US?!

  A dreadful howl of rage from the Beast rang out inside his head. However, this cry almost seemed to contain the slightest echo of sadness.

  No! I’m not going to destroy you or anything! This sword can’t hurt you!!

  Haruyuki intently turned his thoughts toward the Beast. But right away, an overwhelming torrent of hatred threatened to swallow them up.

  LIES! ALL WHO EXIST ARE DECEIVERS, CHEATERS, TRAITORS!! I TRUST NO ONE!!

  The voice sounded somehow like a sob, and several threads of a jet-black aura spilled out of the hole dug out of his chest armor. These tangled up around the blade of the longsword and tried to push it back from the chest.

  Desperately fighting the reaction, Haruyuki shouted, I’m not telling you to trust me!! But there’s one person in this world who loves you and cares for you!! Her…Trust her!!

  A pure white light gushed from Haruyuki’s sword-hand. The aura, glittering dazzlingly, began to wrap around the sinister form of the greatsword, moving from the hilt to the tip. The parts the light touched changed design, evaporating, and the figure of a new sword appeared from inside. A flowing silver longsword with several stars caught inside the semitransparent blade. The Enhanced Armament Star Caster.

  “Unh…aaaaaaah!!” Together with a fierce cry in his own voice, Haruyuki stabbed his own chest with the longsword that had regained its original form, up to the hilt.

  The blow generated no numerical damage. He didn’t feel pain or even the impact. Instead, Haruyuki took in a single image with all five senses: an infinite darkness filling a thick, superhard shell.

  A small fissure ran along the metal shell covering his world. Through the crack, a brilliant white light reminiscent of the spring sun came pouring in. The fissure grew bigger before his eyes, and the light steadily grew stronger. From beyond this dazzling shine, almost too bright to look at directly, someone was flying into the world of darkness, both arms outstretched.

  Wrapped in golden-yellow armor with a flower-petal motif. Glittering drops of light spilling out of sky-blue eye lenses. The girl who had lived in the longsword Star Caster and had continued to pray earnestly for so, so long—Saffron Blossom.

  Gently descending, Blossom stood tall and faced the center of the world of darkness.

  An enormous something existed there, its body covered in jet-black flames, a something with eyes the color of blood and long fangs. The Beast.

  Not frightened in the least, the golden-yellow girl walked over to it, reaching out with her right hand. “I’m sorry. I left you alone for so long. You must have been sad…It was so hard, wasn’t it?”

  A low groan spilled from the massive maw of the Beast. It tucked its head in and shook it quickly, back and forth, as though it couldn’t believe the girl was standing there before it. It tried to step back, tail hanging.

  But Blossom approached with a resolute step and didn’t hesitate before taking the enormous head into her outstretched hands. She stroked the conflagration of fur. “We’ll always be together from now on. Always, always together…”

  Pop! The black flames covering the Beast burst. A massive energy wave spread out within the shell and was finally absorbed it. And then, standing there—

  Not a duel avatar, but a real-bodied little girl. Her hair was cut boyishly short. She wore a large-ish hooded sweater and culottes. And in both arms, she held a small black cat.

  The girl smiled gently and, still holding the kitten, took a few steps forward. A little ways off stood the boy—Chrome Falcon. His lips trembled, and he timidly raised his right hand.

  The little girl started running toward him. The two grew closer with each passing breath until the tips of their outstretched fingers touched, clasped, and held each other tightly.

  Fal!!

  Fron!!

  Their voices became a gentle wave and echoed throughout the metal shell.

  And then the thick shell enclosing the darkness turned into a myriad of flower petals and broke apart abruptly.

  As if melting into the dancing snowy white lights, all the suffering, hatred, and sadness that had filled the Armor sublimated away. Riding on the twinkling, fleeting sound of a bell, it all flowed, drifted, and receded.

  On the verge of returning from the world of the image to the madder red of the duel field, Haruyuki felt like he could hear that voice.

  FAREWELL, MY FINAL COMRADE. YOU…ARE STRONG. STRONGER THAN ME. I DESTROY AND AM DESTROYED AGAIN BY ALL THOSE PEOPLE. I PRAY YOUR LIGHT REMAINS IN THE WORLD AND YOU CUT OUT T
HE ROOT OF THE EVIL…

  At the same time as the voice faded, Haruyuki was restored to the Accelerated World—the sky of the Twilight stage. In his right arm, the body of the injured Black Lotus. His left hand held nothing at all.

  And the metal armor of his body reflected the light of the setting sun, shining a pure, mirrored silver.

  10

  “……Kuroyukihime.”

  Haruyuki gave voice to this one word, filling it with every drop of the flood of emotions within him.

  He couldn’t help but feel such guilt that he wanted to rip his own body apart for falling into the berserker state and injuring so severely the swordmaster he had sworn to protect, Black Lotus—Kuroyukihime.

  However, Kuroyukihime had dared to stop Haruyuki’s fists with her own body after he’d lost himself and gone wild. Given that the king had enough actual power to inflict serious damage on even a Super-class Enemy like the God Suzaku, she should have been able to at least counter the blows, even if her opponent was the rampaging Chrome Disaster. But instead, she had taken every bit of the beating he had mercilessly brought down on her. She had believed that Haruyuki would regain himself again…

  In Silver Crow’s arms as he hovered in the air, hearing the trembling voice calling her name, Kuroyukihime blinked bluish-purple eye lenses irregularly beneath her battered, mirror-finish goggles. Her endlessly kind and gentle response flowed out on the faint wind of the stage.

  “…Welcome back, Silver Crow. You did…well…” The half-broken sword of her left hand gently stroked the surface of the round helmet.

  “Kuro…yuki…” Once more, he squeezed a faltering voice out and desperately suppressed the sobs rising up in him.

  He wanted to bury his face in her chest and wail like a little kid. But this was not yet the time for that. There was still one more thing he had to do. He had a promise to keep with his erstwhile partner, the pseudo-intelligence of the Beast. It would probably take a long time to fulfill his vow to cut the root of evil from the world, but he would fire the first shot into this battlefield. To show the pride of the Black Legion and his own as a Burst Linker.

  Kuroyukihime seemed to pick up on his intent through their armor touching. She nodded once, very slightly. “We have one chance, one moment. We’re both close-range types, so we’ll have to carry out the attack with long-range Incarnate. But we don’t have the luxury of slowly mustering up the image…You focus on targeting, I’ll provide the power.”

  Despite the fact that she was so thoroughly injured that, viewed from any angle, it seemed any further fighting was impossible, Kuroyukihime’s words were filled with a firm resolve to fight. Haruyuki returned her nod and cleared his mind.

  “We go from a count of three. Two, one, zero!”

  In time with the instruction, he whirled his body around abruptly.

  Below him, an enormous chalky spire rose up in the center of his field of view, bathed in the evening sun—Mori Tower. The roof had been swept clear of objects in the earlier clash between Black Lotus and Chrome Disaster, and transformed into a perfectly white plain.

  In the center of this bled a single small, black dot. It was the shadow produced by Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime midflight with the sun behind them. However, for this moment alone, it was not simply a lighting effect of the virtual world: It was also the hiding place of his sworn enemy, the Burst Linker for whom, no matter how great the hatred in Haruyuki’s heart became, it would never be enough.

  Yes. In that instant, within that tiny shadow hid the layered avatar who called himself the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, the restrainer, Black Vise. One branch of the root of all evil the Beast had told Haruyuki to cut out.

  “Crow! Your hand!!” Kuroyukihime shouted sharply, lifting her right sword high.

  The tip of her sword-arm shone with a hazy golden overlay and separated with a snap to produce five slender fingers. Instinctively, Haruyuki reached out with his left hand and tangled his fingers tightly around them. From their clasped hands, the brilliant light of two auras—one crimson red, one silver—jetted out.

  At that point, no doubt guessing something was amiss, a single, thin black panel slid out from the blurred shadow on the roof thirty meters below. Black Vise. The panel slid along as if glued to the floor, heading for the inner edge of the roof—more precisely, the enormous shadow that fell on the eastern wall of the building. If the roof had remained covered with its original pillars and walls, this layered avatar, with the unusual ability to move from shadow to shadow, would have been able to leisurely escape the battlefield without exposing himself.

  But every single object capable of producing a shadow had already been destroyed. And the tower was the tallest building in the area. The only shadow etched onto that roof was that of Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime. And this was no coincidence—Haruyuki flew at these coordinates after precisely calculating the angle and distance that would produce this condition.

  For these reasons, Black Vise could not, as he had done so many times before, sink into the shadows and escape—he could not, in his own words, show off his “greatest ability,” fleeing.

  This was their one moment, their one chance.

  Haruyuki concentrated the image of light in his left hand as fast as he could, pushing up against the limits of the speed he had managed up to that point. The crimson overlay produced in Kuroyukihime’s right hand carved a spiral in the silver one he generated, fusing with it.

  “Laser Lance!!”

  “Vorpal Strike!!”

  The two different technique names rang out, one over the other in perfect unison.

  From between their clasped hands, the two auras extended, carving out a trajectory like the double helix of DNA to produce a single, enormous lance.

  Movement synchronized, the pair threw the lance toward the tower below. The silver-and-crimson javelin plunged ahead, ripples spreading out around it in the virtual atmosphere, and quickly closed in on the thin black panel quickening its slide away. The two parallel tips touched the center of the panel.

  And then Haruyuki saw it.

  The jet-black sheet scattering into countless fragments and radiating outward.

  The lance did not stop there; it touched the white roof and easily dug into it, as if pushing through the surface of a body of water.

  Leaving behind only a high-pitched skrnnn of resonance, it disappeared into the two hundred thirty-eight meters of the massive building.

  A few seconds later, from far lower on the building, a vibration wave like the earth trembling came racing upward. The decorative windows of the building’s outer walls shuddered violently, along with the pillars and bas reliefs straight out of temples of Ancient Greece, some of them even cleaving from their homes. And the damage didn’t stop there: Deep cracks raced, one after another, along the entire outside wall, a torrent of flaming energy erupting from inside…

  In the next instant, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, a landmark and without a doubt one of the largest structures in the Accelerated World, began to collapse, reduced to an infinite amount of falling rubble.

  The phenomenon itself was incredible, but for Haruyuki, the complete destruction of the enormous building was just one more thing to fill his special-attack gauge. More important was the burst point addition system message that scrolled in small letters along the left side of his field of view. This meant, then, that the earlier combined Incarnate attack had pushed the health gauge of his sworn enemy Black Vise down to zero—he was dead.

  Of course, death in the Accelerated World was, for the majority of Burst Linkers, an everyday occurrence. Their points simply decreased a certain number as a penalty, and they came back to life perfectly fine in the next duel in the Normal Duel Field, or an hour later in the Unlimited Neutral Field. However, there was an exception to this rule.

  “Kuroyukihime!” Hands still intertwined, Haruyuki turned toward her and shouted, “How about it?!”

  The question omitted the subject, but the Black Kin
g still shook her head slightly. “No. From the number of points added, he seems to be level eight.”

  “…He is, huh…” Haruyuki said, letting out the breath he’d been holding.

  If the restrainer Black Vise had reached the same level nine as Kuroyukihime, the sudden-death rule would have applied to him now, and he would have lost all his points in one swoop and been forever banished from the Accelerated World. Given Vise’s history—basically one of the oldest residents of this world—and his unfathomable powers, Haruyuki had anticipated that it might at least be a possibility, but unfortunately, that schemer had apparently stopped at level eight.

  Which meant that the layered avatar, instantly dying when pierced by the Incarnate lance, remained in the field as a small death marker and would regenerate in an hour. If they challenged him again there without letting him run off and defeated him over and over again, at some point, they would press him to total loss…but…

  “It’ll be quite the chore to find his marker in that mountain of rubble.”

  At the sound of Kuroyukihime’s voice, Haruyuki looked down at the enormous pile of destruction that had been Mori Tower. He couldn’t begin to guess how many tens or hundreds of thousands of wreckage objects were stacked up in that pyramid; it was indeed a fact that it would be difficult to turn each of them over to find the death marker.

  “And there are a lot of shadows on the ground, too. I feel like next time would probably just end with him running off at top speed.”

  “Mmm. That’s exactly it…Well, at any rate, we did defeat him once, he who is so proud of his fleet-footedness. That should serve nicely as a declaration of war,” Kuroyukihime responded before gently untangling her hand from Haruyuki’s. The five slender fingers made an ephemeral cracking sound before shattering.