This show was immediately followed by a thin break in the white, thickly flowing fog, and then the massive pillars soaring up on either side of the warriors began to fall soundlessly in groups of two, as if chasing that fog. The six columns crashed into the earth, setting off successive waves of sound rumbling the earth, and shattered into countless blue-black metallic chunks. All that remained were stumps with mirror-smooth cross sections.
“N-no way…,” Haruyuki could only mutter, stunned.
He was sure that the affiliation of this general duel field was Demon City. And the first characteristic of the Demon City was abnormally hard-terrain objects. Back when he had been training in the Incarnate System, he had only been able to dig a few centimeters into the wall of a Demon City building, and he had needed a full week of intense training just to be able to do that much. And yet Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade had, with a flash of their swords, simultaneously cut down three pillars each. Haruyuki had no doubt that if he had been standing in place of one of those pillars, his head and torso would have been severed from each other in a single blow.
So that was the actual power of the most elite Leonid Linkers. Which meant the king’s power would be even greater.
I—we, we’re trying to fight people like this…
The incredibly deep horror made his avatar shudder all over when he felt an unexpected pat on his back.
Sky Raker, the dazzling avatar bearing no weaponry of any kind, brought her mouth to Haruyuki’s ear. “Chopping down immobile pillars is a parlor trick, Corvus. You look so freaked out right now, and you know you’ll be punished for it later. ”
She left him as he snapped to attention and the Black King, together with her sworn friend, began to walk calmly toward the pillar stump closest to them. Kuroyukihime alone sat down, while Raker took up a place standing behind her. Haruyuki, fearing the punishment of his teacher Raker more than the blades of the warrior avatars, could only hurry after them and stand next to her, arms crossed and chest thrust out.
The warriors also retreated behind their master, and the hush that instantly fell over the stage was broken by Kuroyukihime.
“Now then, greetings to the inviting king are finished, so how about you all show your faces already?” she said, slightly exasperated. “One hundred seconds have long since passed, you know.”
Indeed, the counter was already cutting into 1,600 seconds. But what did she mean by “show your faces”? There were still only the six members of the Blue and Black Legions there…
This thought in mind, Haruyuki was about to search the stage with his eyes, but before he could, a voice that held both innocent childishness and immoveable strength rang out from somewhere, followed by a gentle footfall.
“Dang. What’s with that tone, Lotus? And here I was being respectful.”
He lifted his face with a gasp to see a single silhouette appear about three meters to the right on an adjacent stump. A dark red avatar, erect, with a form reminiscent of a carnivorous beast. He didn’t have to see the triangular pointed ears or the long tail to know that this was a senior member of the Red Legion, Prominence, nicknamed “Bloody Kitty”: Blood Leopard.
And seated on her left arm was a small crimson avatar, the owner of the voice. Two antennae stretching out like pigtails. Round, cute eye lenses. Curved, smooth armor on her limbs. Her coloring coupled with her tiny size made her almost like a single ruby. But this adorable little girl was the leader of Prominence, ruler of the Nerima and Nakano areas, the Red King, Scarlet Rain.
She didn’t have equipped the massive firepower containers from which her nickname “Immobile Fortress” came. Staring at her cute profile, Haruyuki opened his mouth to call to them: Rain, Pard! But the two red avatars emitted an aura that was just as fierce as that of the Blue King, and he clamped his mouth shut again.
It was different from the overlay of the Incarnate System; it was an invisible, pure fighting spirit. Although this was the Accelerated World, where all things were set in digital code, this phenomenon of “feeling auras” was no illusion. In terms of the logic, a rather occult explanation could be offered—that the aura was perhaps the weight of the battle history information within a duel avatar, coded as an exertion of physical pressure on another person—but in fact, it was simply that the truly strong overwhelmed the lower ranks with their presence alone, in just the way these two red avatars were making Haruyuki cower.
The Red King, real name Yuniko Kozuki aka Niko; Blood Leopard, aka Pard; and Haruyuki were all friends; they had all exposed their true identities to one another in the real. And Prominence and Nega Nebulus had concluded a ceasefire treaty of unlimited term after fighting together in the past. That said, however, their faces clearly communicated that their relationship was nowhere near the sort where they could be familiar with each other and hang out no matter the time or place. Haruyuki felt that this was the right course, although it did make him a little sad. But everyone who possessed Brain Burst was there to fight and grow stronger.
No.
In truth, there was one other reason why it was hard for Haruyuki to face Niko.
As Legion Master, Niko was supposed to have annihilated Chrome Disaster, thought to be parasitizing Silver Crow at that moment, with a Judgment Blow to her own “parent,” the Armament’s previous owner. So, in a certain sense, Niko’s motivation for seeking the death penalty for Haruyuki was greater than that of any of the other kings coming together in that spot.
He forcibly stopped himself from pushing his thoughts further in this direction and turned to face forward again. At the same time, Blood Leopard’s low voice reached his ears.
“Just me and the king from Promi. Greetings omitted.”
Jumping down from her lieutenant’s arm, Niko sat herself on the steel stool and Leopard stepped back to her rear, hands on her hips.
With that, three of the seven kings were together. The Blue King sat on the centermost of the seven amputated pillars, which were arranged in a semicircle. The Black King faced him on the right end, and to her right was the Red King.
Haruyuki braced himself for who would come next and from where.
“Heh. Heh-heh-heh…” Rather than footsteps, a throaty, high-pitched voice echoed from the distant side of the fog.
He had definitely heard this laugh, filled with obvious scorn and ridicule, somewhere else, but he couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. He whirled his head to look around, but each time, the source seemed to cut around behind him.
“Heh-heh…King, hmm? I do believe king is supposed to be short for the Seven Kings of Pure Color, if my memory’s correct? But isn’t the coloring of the little one sitting there a tad too cheap to be red, hmm?” The words flung from the fog were clearly meant to mock Scarlet Rain.
Niko was the only second-generation king among the rulers of the seven major Legions. The previous Red King, Red Rider, had had his head cut off two and a half years earlier in a single strike by the Black King, and had been forced to leave the Accelerated World forever due to the sudden-death rule that applied to fights between level niners. Niko had revived Prominence when it was on the verge of collapse and named herself its new master. Her avatar was indeed a slightly bright scarlet rather than a pure red, but that was absolutely no reason to treat her like an impostor. Because—
“C-color’s got nothing to do with it! Rain climbed to level nine under her own power, and there’s no other requirement for being a king!”
—is why.
And here, Haruyuki finally realized that he was the one who had shouted the thought rolling around in his brain. Raker giggled next to him, and Niko herself, seated not far from him, appeared to be smiling wryly.
“The crow over there took the words from my mouth, so I’ll just add one thing. If you wanna talk cheap, your banana color’d give me a good run for my money. But we don’t have time for this. Just come out already,” the Red King said, and snapped the fingers of her right hand to point at the middle pillar in line wi
th her, three removed.
Hurriedly directing his gaze that way, Haruyuki realized that a tiny paper doll was standing on a stump he had simply assumed was empty. Cocking his head about five centimeters to one side, he finally understood. It was an observer dummy avatar, just like the one Kuroyukihime had used to gather information in the Accelerated World when she was in hiding from the kings’ assassins. The voice’s owner had taken advantage of the fact that they were connecting to the field as the Gallery to change his avatar into something extremely inconspicuous.
As soon as Haruyuki came to this realization, white smoke puffed up from the paper doll’s center. The smoke was carried away by the slight wind in the stage, leaving a slim, clown-type duel avatar with a brilliant—or garish—yellow appearance standing in the center of the pillar. Hat with large, curved horns jutting out on either side. A face mask with thin eyes and mouth cut into the form of a smile. Long, gangly limbs stretching out from rounded, bulbous shoulders and hips.
“Heh-heh!” The clown allowed another burst of laughter to slip out as he ran a finger as thin as a wire along his chin. “Banana color, what a terrible thing to say! I personally like to offer up the example of uranium, you see? But, well, I suppose there’s no helping it. Everyone knows that the monkey and her child love bananas, now, don’t they? Heh-heh.”
The clown before them bobbing his head and continuing to laugh was the very person who had once laid a trap for Kuroyukihime and Niko: the Yellow King, head of the Legion Cosmic Crypt Circus, which ruled the three areas of Taito, Arakawa, and Adachi, along with Akihabara—Yellow Radio.
Given the king’s chatty style and flamboyant gestures, Haruyuki didn’t feel the same oppressive aura in him as he did with the other kings. However, having witnessed the close combat between Yellow Radio and Kuroyukihime at close range, he knew only too well that this was not an opponent to take lightly. Despite the fact that Radio was an unblemished yellow—meaning that he was a purely midrange-attack type—he had crossed swords with Black Lotus without retreating even a single step.
The Yellow King had apparently come without any aides in tow. Controlling his laughter, he brought his right hand to his chest and bowed in exaggerated curtsy before moving smoothly from the bow into a seated position on the pillar.
So that’s four.
“So who’s not here yet? Let’s see,” Haruyuki muttered, just as his ears caught the sound of haughty footsteps.
Rrk, rrk! Intense vibrations shook the stage from the right behind him. He whirled around just as a large avatar split the fog and stepped forward.
It was big, but not quite a giant. In terms of mere size, it probably wasn’t even as big as the main Blue Legion member, Frost Horn, much less Niko with her Enhanced Armament deployed. But Haruyuki had never before faced an avatar possessing this kind of overwhelming solemnity. Mask, shoulders, lower body—all were covered in armor reminiscent of thick boards. But the hips were thin and tense, erasing any suggestion of sluggishness. His right hand was empty, but an equally large and solid shield was equipped in his left. All the armor was a vibrant green, deeper than emerald.
“The Green King,” Haruyuki said quietly. He had only seen this avatar once for a few seconds, and in a replay video of a past fight, no less.
Next to him, Raker nodded. “Yes,” she added in a whisper. “That’s Green Grandé, the leader of the Legion ‘Great Wall.’ Their territory is large, stretching from Shibuya to Ota. His nickname is ‘Invulnerable.’”
“Right, his HP gauge has never once gone into the yellow…,” Haruyuki murmured with an unconscious sigh. His own gauge frequently ended up bright red in same-level duels, even when he won.
In front of him, Kuroyukihime puffed her nose lightly in indignation. “To begin with, he’s actually not been in that many duels. Apparently, he earned the points he needed to make it to level nine almost entirely by hunting Enemies solo. Although that is still a significant enterprise.”
“Aaah.” Haruyuki let out another admiring sigh. Even the smallest of the strangely shaped Enemies loping through the Unlimited Neutral Field had serious fighting power, and on top of a player having to nearly kill themselves to defeat one, very few points were actually earned in that victory. Haruyuki loved grinding in a regular RPG, but even he was happier begging off Enemy hunting unless he started seriously losing in the general PVP duels.
Completely unaware of the respectful gazes from a distance, the “level-up artisan,” the Green King, approached the pillar between Niko and the Blue King with a sure step and set himself down heavily. Like the Yellow King, he had come without any other Legion members. He said nothing, and so the silence remained unbroken, but no one seemed to find this the least bit strange. He had apparently established himself as the quiet type.
Facing forward once more, Haruyuki took a deep breath. With the passing of time here, he felt like he had gotten used to the intense auras of these strongest residents of the Accelerated World, the kings. In fact, at some point, his trembling knees had anchored themselves, and the cold numbness of his hands had vanished.
Right. There’s no need to freak out. I mean, I’m the Black King’s subordinate—no, her “child.” I have every right to stand tall like Raker, he told himself and went to thrust his chest out and do just that.
“Ngh?!” He felt something like a cold hand clutching his heart and cringed with maximum fear.
What…is this? Bloodlust…? No, not that. It’s more decisive…the will to remove. A silent declaration…that I will be judged and banished from the Accelerated World.
Tak. Tak. High-pitched footsteps echoed from nowhere.
Stiffening up, he pricked his ears intently. The north. The footfalls drew nearer, walking toward the semicircle of seated kings. He turned his gaze that way, tensed neck creaking.
A single silhouette on the other side of the dense fog. Seeing it only at the shadow level, he intuitively felt it was a girl-shaped avatar from the long hair parts and the skirt-shaped armor swinging. The waist was constricted impossibly thin; the legs were like needles.
Tak. Tak. Tak. The footsteps, swords piercing the earth, perhaps sounded so sharp because of pin heels twice as high as the ones Sky Raker had. The instant those feet stepped into the ring of the pillars, the deep fog hanging over the area was largely blown away, as if the ferocity of the auras there was too much to endure.
If there was one word to describe the avatar that was finally revealed then, it was not king; nothing other than queen would do. What had looked like hair was armor in the form of a long veil stretching out from the circlet on her forehead. Her face mask was pointed and beautiful, and her shoulder and chest parts were also feminine and yet intimidating. Partitioned armor in the shape of a long skirt stretched down from a high position on her waist, exposing her long, slender legs in gaps that went almost up to her hips.
There was no doubt that this duel avatar was the most deserving of the word bewitching of all the avatars Haruyuki had ever seen. However, her beauty was not the inviting kind; various parts of her body, including the tiara on her head, were edged with thorny adornments, spiked ends glittering. In her right hand, she carried a bishop’s staff about a meter and a half or so long. At its tip was a rose vine with remarkably long needles. All her armor was a mysterious purple that shimmered hypnotically each time it caught the light.
“And so she appears,” Sky Raker murmured, almost inaudibly, while narrowing her eye lenses and staring at the approaching queen. “Of all the kings gathering here today, she is probably the most antagonistic toward us. Leader of the Legion Aurora Oval, ruling over the area from Ginza to the bay, nicknamed Empress Voltage: the Purple King, Purple Thorn. And the staff she’s carrying in her right hand is one of the Seven Arcs, the Tempest.”
“A-arcs?” Haruyuki parroted back.
“The strongest class of Enhanced Armaments in the Accelerated World,” Raker added in hurried explanation. “It’s assumed there are seven in total. The ones that have been c
onfirmed as of present, other than that staff, are the Impulse, the large sword the Blue King has; the Strife, the large shield the Green King has; and then the last one is…” Here, Haruyuki could feel Raker momentarily falter for some reason, but he no longer had the opportunity to ask her about it.
The Purple King, moving forward leisurely through the center of the ring of pillars, stopped when she was closest to Kuroyukihime, who was sitting on the farthest right of the shorn columns. The queen stabbed the bottom end of her staff into the earth loudly, her thin veil swinging and her mask turning slightly toward the Black King. Her angled eye lenses housed a cold amethyst light.
The instant he felt the pressure the girl-shaped avatar had been radiating in no particular direction grow even stronger, and then focus on the three members of Nega Nebulus, Haruyuki very nearly fainted for real. If it had been a clear anger or hatred, he could’ve actually handled it. In the eight months since Haruyuki had become a Burst Linker, he had been in countless fights where he had come up against all kinds of anger.
But emanating from the Purple King was not any simple emotion; it was absolute rejection, a rejection so unyielding anyone who came up against it would instantly realize that there was no room for mutual understanding there. Haruyuki instinctively felt that this opponent would never stop fighting them, no matter how the situation might change in the future. Right up until the bitter demise of the Accelerated World.
“It’s been a long time, Lotus,” the Purple King, Purple Thorn, said quietly after looking down at Black Lotus for two seconds. “I never thought the day would come when I would be speaking to you again like this.”
There was nothing thorny about her tone; it was smooth like ice. Haruyuki swallowed even harder with the nervous certainty that this voice only had to break to reveal the countless sharp edges it contained. But he had heard the Purple King speak somewhere before, that sweet girlishness mixed in with her grave majesty, and after thinking about it, he remembered soon enough: He had definitely heard this girl speak once before. Not directly, of course. The Purple King had been in the replay video he had seen in the Unlimited Neutral Field. The sound came back to life in his ears from the depths of his memory.
Shrine Maiden of the Sacred Fire Page 3