Shrine Maiden of the Sacred Fire

by Reki Kawahara

  However, Utai had already shifted her gaze away from him and begun to focus her mind. She stood, arms loosely apart, eyes closed, the gentle flames of her overlay enveloping her body.

  And then her avatar changed rather unexpectedly.

  From below the hair-type parts hanging down on both sides of her face, additional armor slid out with a clang and covered her entire mask. Only a thin eye line, tracing an upward arc, existed in the smooth, perfectly white, curved armor. Almost—no, exactly like an actual mask. The eyes carved into this new face were both gentle and severe, depending on the angle. At the very least, there was no hint of the innocence of her original mask.

  The next change was the generation of the Japanese bow gripped in her left hand. It was no sooner engulfed in a raging fire than it instantly shrank down to a fraction of its length. Utai moved this thing, now a short, flaming stick, to her right hand, and held it out directly in front of her. Haruyuki guessed that it was a gun or something when—

  Bang! The sharp noise reverberated in his ears, and the stick spread out in a thin layer into the shape of a metal folding fan, its base the center of the bow. It was not a weapon, much less a projectile; it was, just as it appeared to be, a hand fan. He wanted to shout out, Why’d you give up a good bow for a fan?! but he couldn’t disturb her concentration at this point.

  Left with no other choice, Haruyuki prepared himself to defend against Utan’s beam attack and sent his eyes racing around his surroundings. If Utan’s overlay had been a vivid primary color, he might have been able to see it through the thick grass, but the black aura melted into the darkness of the depths; he could see no sign of it. As before, he could hear nothing in the way of footsteps, so identifying where the attack would come from was many times more problematic than guessing the trajectory of an oncoming punch.

  No. Even if he could kill the sound of his movement, Utan would have to make extraneous sound just once before his attack. And that sound would be the call of the technique name. Unlike normal special attacks, this wasn’t required for Incarnate attacks, but immediately releasing the attack without the imagination trigger of the voice was a fairly high-level skill. Having only gotten the ISS kit a few days earlier, Utan wouldn’t have that level of technique.

  Haruyuki snapped out the fingertips of his right hand and focused all his powers of perception on listening. The wind howling, the grass rustling—he eliminated every kind of noise from his awareness. He simply waited intently for Utan’s voice, the memory of which still lingered from a few minutes earlier.

  Several long, long seconds passed, and then finally it touched Haruyuki’s senses:

  “Da—”

  Haruyuki’s eyes flew open. “Laser Sword!!”

  “—rk Shot!!”

  The two Incarnate names rang out at nearly the same time.

  A beam of darkness shot at Ardor Maiden from behind them, and Haruyuki cut sharply upward. From his fingertips, a silver aura stretched out into a sword. The tip touched the jet-black aura—

  Skriiiing! The sound of the collision was earsplitting. The beam’s trajectory shifted upward, and it just barely grazed Utai’s shoulder before narrowly disappearing into the night sky. Surprise raced across Utan’s mask as he stood up in the distance. But he quickly sank back into the grass and concealed himself with his high-speed movement.

  Haruyuki had defended against that Incarnate one time, just as Utai had instructed, but he was certain that a second beam would be closing in on them in seconds. Not knowing what to do, he looked at Ardor Maiden next to him. Utan’s fighting spirit didn’t seem to be waning at all, despite the fact that Incarnate attacks used an invisible mental strength gauge rather than consuming an avatar’s special-attack gauge.

  The small avatar was gently moving the fan in her right hand, face still equipped with the actual mask. Her movement was almost like a dance.

  The moment this thought crossed his mind, something prickled in his distant memory.

  He felt like he had seen this somewhere before. Right, when he was little, he had seen some kind of play at the large shrine where he had gone for his first shrine visit of the year with his parents. While mystical music played, a woman in a white robe and red hakama had danced with a fan in one hand. She had looked almost exactly like Utai did now, with a few important differences: The woman in the play all that time ago hadn’t been wearing a mask, and Utai’s movements were more dynamic. Her tempo was more varied; she stopped completely at key moments. Her dance was nothing short of incredible.

  Taking in the way Ardor Maiden moved, he forgot almost entirely about the beam attack threatening to destroy them any instant.

  A sonorous voice flowed from the mouth area of her mask. Not a yell, it still seemed like it echoed from one end of the stage to the other, a clear, strong “song.”

  “The slight cool of the three heats.”

  Suddenly, the clearing shimmered gently as far as he could see. Heat haze—no, fire. A gleam the same flame color as the haze enveloping Utai’s body blanketed the stage far off into the distance. This was meant to be the light of her Incarnate—her overlay—but the range was just too large. It was on par with or maybe even greater than Rust Order, the space-corroding Incarnate attack Rust Jigsaw unleashed to destroy the Hermes’ Cord race the week before.

  As he held his breath, her high-pitched voice continued to flood his ears. “Is this the only escape from suffering?”

  The world…burned.

  Crimson flames roared up in all directions, nearly touching the sky, and the grassland around them instantly went up in smoke. The entire stage shone red, countless sparks flowing across the night sky like stars.

  Only a radius of about two meters centered on Utai was apparently safe; the flames didn’t cross into this area. But Haruyuki had the illusion of fierce heat, enough to burn him up, and he groaned uncontrollably.

  Ardor Maiden moved her fan gently. Before it, the blaze swirled even more ferociously, burning up not just the grass, but even the virtual ground beneath. And then the curtain of flames parted, and he could see a small shadow.

  Bush Utan. His entire body was enveloped in the blaze, and both hands had already burned away entirely; they were gone.

  But strangely, he himself seemed not to feel the heat. He was looking down at his own avatar curiously, essentially nothing more than a pillar of flame. Haruyuki reflexively checked the health gauge in the top right of his gaze and saw that it was dropping with incredible speed. Soon, it was less than 30 percent, and even when the gauge dropped into a red more concentrated than the flames, it continued to plummet without stopping. Twenty percent, ten. And then zero.

  The human-shaped fire flashed for a dazzling moment and then disappeared.

  Dumbfounded, Haruyuki brought his gaze back to Utai.

  The small avatar was dancing even more fluidly. As he stared wordlessly, Haruyuki felt her dance was bringing him answers to his many questions.

  Maiden didn’t just mean “an innocent girl.” It also meant “a woman or girl who serves a shrine.” Of course, the white and red armor was reminiscent of a shrine. This was the figure of a shrine maiden, after all.

  So then the meaning of Ardor was fire. Hotter than fire, fiercer than flames, a world-destroying conflagration.

  Ardor Maiden.

  The shrine maiden of the inferno.

  7

  Tuesday, June 18.

  Haruyuki scarfed down his usual breakfast of cereal with milk, called out a good-bye to his mother’s bedroom, and hurried out of the apartment.

  Although the sun had its face out for the first time in a long time, the air was sticky and wet. The discomfort index had gone through the roof, and it was a foregone conclusion that even the slightest bit of exercise would immediately produce in him rivers of sweat, but even still, he headed toward the main road in front of his building at a trot.

  But he wasn’t late. The destination he was hurrying to was not school, but on the way to school. Coming out
onto the ring road of Kannana Street, Haruyuki passed the place where he usually turned right and kept going south, down the wide sidewalk.

  He slipped under the elevated Chuo Line tracks and climbed the gentle hill. In a few minutes, he came out at the large intersection where Kannana and Oume Kaido met. He went up the escalator to the pedestrian walkway, stopped in the center of Kannana Street, and glanced at the clock in the lower right of his view. 7:45 AM.

  He shifted his gaze to the lanes of EVs passing below him and murmured, “Burst Link.”

  Skreeeeee!! The world froze blue, accompanied by the sound of a collision. The Brain Burst program multiplied the quantum clock generated by his heart and accelerated his consciousness a thousand times, all to produce the initial accelerated space.

  The herd of EVs, dyed a single transparent blue, appeared to have stopped completely, but if he looked very, very carefully, they were actually slowly moving, about a centimeter every second. With this strange sight as the background, Haruyuki moved the hands of his pink pig avatar to open the Brain Burst matching list and breathed a sign of relief when he found the name he was looking for in the surprisingly long list of players. He touched it without hesitation and selected DUEL from the menu that popped up.

  The world transformed once more: The sky grew black around him. The walls of the buildings and convenience stores on both sides of the road were immediately riddled with cracks, and all the cars disappeared. In their place, countless bits of rubble, sinkholes, and rusted drums appeared on the surface of the road.

  An unconscious smile floated up onto Haruyuki’s face as he surveyed the uniformly brutal scene of the Century End stage. It wasn’t as if he particularly liked this stage, but it was absolutely perfect right then. The backdrop for the first duel he had fought with the opponent he selected a few seconds earlier had been a Century End stage, too, a duel that had also been Haruyuki’s—Silver Crow’s—very first.

  He opened his ears. From the north of the wide main road, he could hear the distinctive rumbling of an internal combustion engine. The light blue guide cursor was basically not moving; his opponent appeared to be racing straight toward him with the throttle fully open. He was tempted to hide himself on the pedestrian bridge and leap down just as his opponent was about to pass under, throwing all his force into ramming the motorcyclist with a drop kick.

  But he stuck with his original plan. He casually threw himself into the air and leapt over the railing while his enemy was still invisible. With the wings on his back, he glided down smoothly to land softly on the road surface.

  “Huh?”

  “Crow just got down. What’s he doing?”

  The confused questions came from the members of the Gallery dotting the rooftops of distant buildings in twos and threes. They were no doubt suspicious of Haruyuki throwing away a hard-won advantage, but even as he apologized to them in his head, he knew he hadn’t accelerated to fight this time.

  He put his hands on his hips and waited. A few seconds later, a headlight popped up, dazzling on the other side of the gloom. The roar of the V-twin engine abruptly grew louder. His opponent had also noticed him and seemed to be shifting down for a charge. But instead of readying himself for the first attack and getting into position, Haruyuki thrust both hands high into the air to indicate his complete lack of intention to fight.

  Fortunately, his opponent seemed to get the message. The iron steed from beyond the darkness decelerated, sending sparks shooting out from the front and rear brake rotors, while the rear wheel slid. The bike stopped directly in front of Haruyuki, the orange light of nearby bonfires reflected in its chrome-plated body. The rider took his right hand off the handlebars and waggled an admonishing finger.

  “So bad, man. You started this, and now you’re giving up before the fight even starts?”

  Faced with the grim skull mask of Ash Roller, likely the lone motorcycle user in the entire Accelerated World, Haruyuki bowed his head neatly.

  “I’m sorry. I need to talk to you today, Ash.”

  Ash Roller belonged to the Green Legion Great Wall, which counted Shibuya and the areas south of it as their territory. Naturally, his main duel field should have been Shibuya, but for some reason, he appeared on the matching list in Suginami for a short time on weekday mornings and evenings. Haruyuki supposed he commuted to school by bus along Kannana Street and that this time was probably his “trip abroad” from his own territory, but if that was the case, he was actually pretty daring. If the bus he was riding on was ever identified from where his duel avatar tended to appear, it could lead to his being outed in the real.

  But now that he was thinking about it, no other Burst Linker could be so perfectly described by the words daring and rough, so Haruyuki interrupted his thoughts before they could take that detour and took a few steps toward the motorcycle. He lowered his voice. “And if possible, it would be great if we could talk in Closed mode.”

  “Closed Mode” was, as the name indicated, closed—in other words, a duel that didn’t allow the participation of the Gallery. It could be set with the agreement of both duelers, but in general, other players thought this was stingy. One of the fairly significant motivators of a Burst Linker duel was to show the Gallery a cool trick or two, so almost no one used this mode.

  Naturally, Ash Roller looked unhappy and sniffed haughtily. But he seemed to be amenable to Haruyuki’s will, and he responded with a brief “Gotcha.”

  The motorcycle rider then took a look around them and called in a loud voice that carried well, “Hey, heeeey! Girls and boys of the Gallery! I know you came all this way to see the great and powerful me win, so sorrrry to disappoint, but we’re doing this duel in secret town!”

  Several objections promptly rose up from the buildings around them.

  “What? Come on, that’s booooring!”

  “Just fight for us! We haven’t seen an Ash–Crow matchup in aaaaages!”

  But these voices of discontent changed at once into loud cheers when Ash tossed them a juicy bone: “Got no choice, maaan! This crow kid here’s gonna confess his love to mighty me!”

  Amidst the applause and whistles showering down on him, Haruyuki grew flustered. “Tha—No, it’s—” he shouted, but it was a fact that they had to give the Gallery a bit of a show or they’d never be satisfied. In the end, unsure whether this was real foresight on the part of Ash Roller or if he was just going for laughs, Haruyuki was forced to simply bob his head over and over in a slight bow.

  He then touched on his own name in the top left of his visual field and opened the settings screen. He selected CLOSED from the duel mode change menu and tapped the OKAY button. Once Ash Roller tapped the YES/NO window displayed in his own vision, the Gallery—clamoring even more loudly now—vanished, enveloped in light from one end.

  A silence filled the stage, like the mute button had been pressed. The only thing he could hear was the irregular pulsation of the V-twin engine idling quietly.

  Ash Roller pulled the ignition key out, and then even that engine noise stopped. “So? What’s this whatever you wanna talk about? You lose your wings again…Nah, doesn’t look like it’s that.”

  “Umm…well…It’s just…” Struggling with exactly where to begin, Haruyuki opened his mouth to tell Ash Roller the facts in order. “Yesterday, I was in a duel with Bush Utan from the Green Legion—” he managed to get out.

  “Wh-what did you say?!” Ash Roller’s reaction was completely unexpected. He slipped down from his bike onto the ground, practically falling out of his seat, and the fierce-faced rider very nearly slammed his skull-design face mask into Haruyuki’s, shouting, “Where?! What time was this?!”

  They sat down facing each other on some concrete blocks handily placed on the side of the road, and Haruyuki explained the events of the previous evening’s duel as best he could.

  The fact that, after school, sometime past seven o’clock in Suginami Area Two, his team had challenged the tag team of Bush Utan and Olive Grab. The fact tha
t, although in the opening stages of the duel Bush Utan had stuck to his you feel me? punk act, once he equipped the mysterious ISS kit in the middle, his attitude had changed to one of violence, as if he were an entirely different person. The fact that someone had apparently given Utan this kit three days earlier.

  The only thing he didn’t mention was the name of Ardor Maiden, with whom he’d been teamed up at the time, and her abilities. There had been a few people in the Gallery then, so Ash would probably hear rumors about her at some point, but he still couldn’t indiscriminately leak information about his own Legion friends to other Legions. Ash, for his part, didn’t ask any questions related to this.

  After the fairly lengthy explanation, Ash Roller rested his arms on his kneepads, leaned forward, and expelled a deep, long breath. “IS mode study kit,” he murmured like a groan before looking up at Haruyuki. “This IS mode is that? You know, the Incarnate System?”

  “Y-yeah. I think it’s the same thing. Ash, you already know about…?”

  At Haruyuki’s half-truncated question, the skull helmet swung slowly from side to side. “Just the name, from my master. When I was stuck on figuring out the V-twin Punch before, she taught me that this thing exists, but I didn’t do any training in it. Dunno…I was freaked. Someone tells you you might get swallowed up by the ‘darkness of your heart,’ you know…And plus, now that Master’s back in Negabu, it’s kinda ridiculous for me to go and tell her to teach me.”

  The “master” Ash Roller was talking about was his “parent” and Haruyuki’s own instructor in the Incarnate, Sky Raker. In April of that year, she had formally returned to her old home, the Black Legion Nega Nebulus, so she and Ash Roller, a member of Great Wall, were essentially enemies now. Certainly, the two didn’t seem to be too concerned about it and fought hard against each other in the Territories, but Ash’s position of having trouble leaning on his own parent was certainly a difficult one.