Kuroyukihime’s Return

by Reki Kawahara

  Fortunately, no one raised their voice in reproach against him. He intently carried his heavy body forward on trembling legs, slipping through the tables, breathing becoming faint, until he finally arrived at the very back table the student council members were occupying.

  The first to raise her face was an eighth-grade girl sitting in the very front. Tilting her head and causing ripples in her light hair, she turned a smiling, slightly puzzled face toward Haruyuki and said gently, “Oh…did you need something?”

  Unable to get a yes out, Haruyuki mumbled, “Er…um…uh…”

  At that moment, four of the other council members looked over at Haruyuki. Their faces contained no malice, but the displeased looks from around the table were hard to handle. Just when he was about to pass out from sheer nervousness, the final person at the table at last raised her face from her book.

  Kuroyukihime’s face, which he was seeing for the first time up close and with his flesh-and-blood eyes, was orders of magnitude more beautiful than the avatar he had seen (supposedly) yesterday. Below sharply defined eyebrows under neatly trimmed bangs were eyes that looked black even as they shone brightly. If her avatar was a black rose, then she was a black narcissus. Although he didn’t know if anything like that even existed.

  Haruyuki steeled himself for a look of What is this ugly grade-seven? to appear on this beautiful face. But, surprising him to the core of his being, Kuroyukihime brought that slight smile he remembered to her pale lips and said briefly, “Well, boy. You came.”

  She closed the hardcover book with a snap and invited Haruyuki, still standing stiffly, to join her, as she glanced around at the other council members at the table.

  “I’m the something. Sorry, can you vacate?”

  The last part was directed at the ninth-grade boy sitting next to her. When the tall senior with short hair stood up with a bemused look on his face, she directed Haruyuki to the chair with the palm of her hand.

  Mumbling his thanks, Haruyuki pulled his round body in as much as possible and lowered himself onto the seat. The slender chair creaked magnificently, but Kuroyukihime appeared not to notice at all and, after digging around in the left pocket of her blazer, pulled out something long and thin.

  It was a cable. A thin, silver line, with small plugs at both ends of the shielded cord. After bringing her long hair around to the back with her left hand and inserting one plug into the terminal of the Neurolinker (naturally painted piano black) attached to her surprisingly thin neck, Kuroyukihime casually offered the other plug to Haruyuki. Now a large stir arose among the students in the lounge, all of whom had been carefully studying these events. Mixed in with the din were cries of something akin to distress: “No way!” and “She can’t be serious.”

  Haruyuki was equally taken aback. Beads of sweat appeared suddenly on his face.

  Direct wired transmission.

  Kuroyukihime was inviting Haruyuki to “direct.” Normally, communication happened only through Neurolinkers wirelessly connected to that area’s network server, with several layers of security as intermediaries. Connecting directly with a wire, however, rendered 90 percent of these protective barriers useless. If you had the Linker skills, you could peek into the other user’s private memory and even set up a malevolent program.

  Which is why, normally, directing was limited to people the user trusted implicitly: family, maybe lovers. Put another way, 99 percent of male/female couples directing in public were dating. Even the length of the cable reflected this level of intimacy, in a custom that had no scientific foundation.

  The XSB cable Kuroyukihime was currently holding out was about two meters long, so the problem in this case wasn’t the length. Staring fixedly at the glittering silver terminal, Haruyuki managed somehow to squeeze his voice through his throat and ask, “Uh…um, what am I supposed to…”

  “You can’t do anything besides stick it in your neck, can you?” she asserted without missing a beat.

  Very close to passing out now, Haruyuki took the plug with a shaky hand and fumbled to put it in his own Neurolinker. The moment he did, a warning flashed in front of his eyes: WIRED CONNECTION. As this message faded, only the figure of Kuroyukihime before him was alive against the backdrop of the lounge.

  Although her lips, still toying with a faint smile, did not move a millimeter, her smooth voice sounded in Haruyuki’s brain. “Sorry to ask you to come all the way over here, Haruyuki Arita. Can you neurospeak?”

  The skill of having a conversation without moving your lips, going only through the Linker. Haruyuki nodded and replied, “I can. Um…what exactly is this about? Some kind of elaborate…prank or something?”

  He thought she might get mad, but Kuroyukihime tilted her head slightly to the side and murmured softly, “I suppose…in a certain sense, that’s probably exactly it. Because right now, I am sending an application program to your Neurolinker. If you accept it, the world you have known until now will be completely and utterly destroyed and then rebuilt into something you can’t even conceive.”

  “M-my world…destroyed…?” Haruyuki repeated, dumbstruck.

  Already, the student council members at the table were staring with deep interest in where this would go and the students making a fuss around them had essentially disappeared from his view. Only Kuroyukihime’s words reverberated in his brain over and over.

  The student clad in black smiled again at Haruyuki’s confusion, raised her right hand, and quickly flicked the tip of her supple, pale finger.

  Followed by a beeping sound.

  And holo dialogue: OPEN BRAIN BURST2039.EXE? YES/NO

  Despite the fact that this was supposedly his own familiar system display, Haruyuki almost felt like the window had its own secret, independent will and was pressing him for a decision.

  In terms of common sense, opening an unknown app sent by a direct connection from a person you didn’t know very well was the very definition of indiscretion. The obvious thing to do would be to yank out the cable right now. But Haruyuki couldn’t do that for some reason. Instead, he looked down at his own body, wedged in tightly on the chair.

  My world. My reality.

  This dull body. Dull face. Endless bullying, escaping to the net. And more than anything else, me doing absolutely nothing to change any of it. My own self, giving up. I just tell myself it’s fine this way and nothing’s going to change anyway.

  Haruyuki shifted his gaze and stared into Kuroyukihime’s pitch-black eyes. And then after a five-second pause, he raised his right hand and poked the YES button with the tip of his finger. He saw her white face suddenly colored with a slight surprise, and a slight satisfaction dripped into his heart.

  “Just what I was hoping for. As long as this world…breaks,” he mumbled, while at nearly the same time, an enormous blaze leapt up to fill his field of vision. The wild flames that had engulfed him, causing him to stiffen up instinctively, finally focused in front of him to form a title logo. The design style was definitely nothing new, with a roughness that brought to mind a certain type of fighting game in fashion at the end of the last century.

  The text that appeared: BRAIN BURST.

  This was how Haruyuki and the program that would revolutionize the world he knew met.

  The installation continued for nearly thirty seconds. For a Neurolinker app, it was pretty huge.

  Haruyuki swallowed hard and stared as the indicator bar displayed below the burning title logo finally reached 100 percent. Kuroyukihime had said it would destroy his world. What did that actually mean?

  The indicator disappeared, and the logo vanished as if it had burnt itself up. The remaining orange flames produced text reading WELCOME TO THE ACCELERATED WORLD in a small English font, which quickly turned into sparks and scattered. What did that mean: accelerated world?

  For ten seconds or so, Haruyuki sat and held his breath, waiting for something to happen. However, no sign or omen of the change to come appeared either in his body or in the scene around him. As
usual, sweat was trickling down under his uniform, and the critical gazes inflicted on him from the surrounding tables seemed to grow even more intense.

  Letting out a long, thin breath, he looked at Kuroyukihime suspiciously. “Um…this Brain Burst program, what exactly…?” he asked in neurospeak, and the black-clad senior murmured something far removed from Haruyuki’s doubts, the smile on her lips never disappearing.

  “So you’ve managed to install it. Although I was certain you had the aptitude for it.”

  “A-aptitude? For this program?”

  “Mm. Brain Burst can’t even be installed in people without high-level cerebral nerve reaction speed. For instance, high enough to get an absurd score in a virtual game. When you saw those phantom flames, the program was checking your brain’s reactions. If you didn’t have the aptitude, you wouldn’t have even been able to see the title logo. But…still, you surprised me somewhat. After all, the old me hesitated for nearly two minutes about whether or not I should accept such a dubious program. I worked out a whole speech to persuade you, and it seems that I wasted my time.”

  “O-oh…I’m sorry. But, um, it…it doesn’t seem like anything’s happening. Is it an app you launch instead of a resident app?”

  “Don’t be impatient. You need to mentally prepare yourself a little first. We can get to the detailed explanations once you do. We have plenty of time.”

  Haruyuki glanced at the clock continuously displayed in the bottom right of his field of vision. Lunch break was already nearly half over. It didn’t exactly seem like they had so much time as all that.

  Almost painfully aware of the way the room around him was a mix of curiosity and disgust, Haruyuki leaned forward. The chair beneath him groaned. It was a sound he was used to hearing, but it almost felt as if even the chair were laughing at how ugly and ridiculous he was, and he bit his lip. No one could possibly love him the way he was now. If he could change everything, he’d do it, no matter what the change ended up being.

  “I’m already prepared. Please tell me what this program is—” He had gotten this far when the voice he least wanted to hear rang out from the lounge entrance behind him.

  “Hey! Pi—Arita! You got a job to do!!”

  Reflexively, he flinched and jumped out of his seat. He turned around to see Araya standing red-faced in front of him, even though he normally never came down from the roof before the end of lunch.

  At the same time as the expression on Haruyuki’s face shifted from shock to terror, Araya’s shifted from rage to doubt. By standing up, Haruyuki had revealed the slender figure of Kuroyukihime, who had been completely hidden in his enormous shadow, along with the cable extending from her Linker and connecting to Haruyuki’s.

  Even frozen in place, Haruyuki was keenly sensitive to the nearly imperceptible shift in the mood of everyone around him except the members of the student council. They must have all instantly grasped the nature of the relationship between the large Araya wearing the same green necktie as Haruyuki, small vertically but big horizontally. But the mood of the students was of course not a reproach of Araya, but rather a sense of consensus, as if to say, Oh, of course.

  Stop. Just stop now, Haruyuki fervently chanted to himself. He seriously hated the idea that Kuroyukihime would know he was being bullied. He offered a stiff smile to Araya with the intention of communicating that once his business here was finished, he would go right away to buy the buns and come up to the roof, so please just be quiet and wait a minute or two.

  Upon seeing this, Araya’s florid face grew even redder in fury. Haruyuki shuddered as he watched Araya’s lips move to form the word pig soundlessly. He had completely misunderstood the meaning of the smile on Haruyuki’s lips as he directed with the most popular student in school.

  Eyes glittering as he raised them, Araya slipped without a word through the hedges separating the cafeteria from the lounge. He approached in a straight line, stepping on the heels of his indoor shoes and making a scuffing sound. Subordinates A and B trailed after him, slightly nervous looks on their faces.

  It’s all over, Haruyuki thought, taking a step backward.

  Araya was so tall and sculpted of solid muscle from karate that it was hard to believe he was also thirteen. On this body, he wore a too-short blazer and a light purple shirt that was conversely way too long, and his pants too were sloppily wide. His hair, dyed a nearly white gold, stood up in points like the flower holders in flower arrangements, and with his very thin eyebrows, piercings decorating both ears, and his almond eyes, he was the very definition of danger.

  Umesato Junior High School was a high-level private school focused on getting kids into university, but in this era of extremely low birth rates, almost no junior high schools still had entrance examinations. Thus, martial artists like Araya sometimes signed up with the idea of an easy ride.

  Having been easily taken down by this type since his first day of school, Haruyuki flinched and stared up at Araya standing in front of him, practically leaning against the smaller boy as he glowered down at him.

  “You making fun of me?” As these words issued between lips twisted into a sneer, Kuroyukihime’s clear real-world voice resonated crisply and clearly before Haruyuki could try to force some menial apology from his mouth.

  “You’re Araya, yes?”

  After a moment’s surprise flitted across his face, Araya smiled flirtatiously. Even a guy like this could apparently be pleased that the Kuroyukihime had remembered his name. But the words that followed astonished not only Araya but Haruyuki as well.

  “I heard about you from Arita. That you might have been sent to junior high school from the zoo.”

  Araya’s jaw dropped suddenly, and Haruyuki stared in dazed amazement at how it trembled. “Wh-wh-wha—” The sound Araya was making was exactly what Haruyuki wanted to scream.

  Wh-what are you talking about?!

  However, he had no chance to give voice to that thought. Araya emitted a fierce, angry bellow. “What the hell?! That’s it! You are so dead, piiiiig!!”

  Haruyuki froze with a start while Araya tightened his right hand into a fist and raised it up high. At the same moment, a sharp voice within his brain gave Haruyuki an order. “Now! Shout it! ‘Burst link’!”

  Haruyuki couldn’t tell if he shouted the short command with his real voice or in neurospeak. But the sound became a vibration that seeped into every corner of his body.

  “Burst link!!”

  The sound of a screeching impact shook his world.

  All color instantly disappeared, leaving only a transparent blue spreading out before him. The lounge, the students watching events play out with suspicious eyes, and even Araya in front of him—all were dyed a monochromatic blue.

  And everything was frozen.

  Haruyuki stared dumbfounded at Araya’s fist, which should have been striking him in another second, suspended a few dozen centimeters in front of him.

  “Wh-whoa!!” he cried out involuntarily, leaping a step back. As a result, Haruyuki saw something even more incredible.

  His own back. His own rounded back, now the same pure blue as Araya, was unnaturally frozen in a ridiculous flinching posture. It was almost like his soul alone had escaped his flesh.

  In which case, what was he now?! When, shocked, he looked down, and he saw there his familiar pink pig. There was no mistake, it was the avatar Haruyuki used on the local net. No longer understanding anything about anything, he turned around unsteadily.

  Where he saw yet another strange sight.

  On the lounge chair, Kuroyukihime was sitting gracefully, knees neatly pressed together, back straight. However, her body and the cable stretching out from her neck, all of it was colored a transparent blue, like a crystal.

  And standing next to her was her avatar, clad in the black dress with the swallowtail butterfly wings and parasol folded into it, a mysterious smile on her lips.

  “Wh-what’s going on here?!” Haruyuki yelled at her, unable to hold back. “Full
dive?! Or…an out-of-body experience?!”

  “Ha, neither,” Kuroyukihime’s avatar informed him cheerfully. “Right now, we are operating in the Brain Burst program. We’re accelerated.”

  “A…accelerated…?”

  “Exactly. Everything around us looks like it has stopped, but in fact, it hasn’t. Our consciousnesses are moving at extremely high speeds.”

  Kuroyukihime took a few steps, causing the silver gems decorating the hem of her dress to glint, and stopped beside the real Haruyuki and Araya, frozen and blue. With the tip of her parasol, she indicated Araya’s fist in a right straight punch trajectory. “This fist, although we can’t see it, is moving very slowly, crawling forward. Like the hour hand of a clock. If we waited like this for quite some time, it would eventually traverse these eighty centimeters, and we would be able to watch it sink slowly into your cheek here.”

  “Y-you’re kidding…No, wait, I mean…J-just hold on a minute.” Haruyuki cradled his head in his pig hands and desperately tried to make sense of this information. “S-so, uh…then this means our souls haven’t actually left our bodies, right? Then all of this is just thinking happening in our heads basically?”

  “You learn fast. That’s exactly it.”

  “But that’s crazy! If you’re saying that just our thinking and our impressions are accelerated, then this…There’s no way I should be able to move around like some out-of-body experience and see my own back or even stand here and have a conversation with you!”

  “Mm, that’s a very natural concern, Haruyuki.” Nodding professorially, Kuroyukihime swung her black hair, twisted into a long roll over her shoulder, and moved to the side of the table. “This blue world we see is the real-time world, but we are not viewing it optically. Go ahead and take a look under the table.”

  “O-okay…” Haruyuki crouched down with the body of his pig, smaller than his real-world body, and peered under the blue table. “Th-that’s…”