Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge

by Reki Kawahara

  Focusing his vision, Haruyuki looked up and saw the lenses built into Argon’s hat flash with the faint light that was the signal for her laser’s launch.

  He left Cerberus to the snowy field and kicked off the ground with all his strength. His left wing had been pierced earlier by Argon’s laser, so there was a hole in a metallic fin, but he was sure he could fly at least as high as the roof of a five-story building. No—he had to fly that far.

  Byook! The laser howled and reached out to Aqua Current. Once again, Argon moved her head the tiniest bit as she fired to thwart Current’s refraction defense. And just like before, the beam of light that couldn’t be bent in time grazed Current’s body, stealing another 10 percent of her health gauge.

  But by then, Haruyuki was already closing in on the fourth floor of the five-story building where Argon stood. He just had to tackle her and bring this to a ground fight. He was a little reluctant to plan a fight with a pinning technique on an F-type avatar, but this was not the time for such concerns. Now was his first and only chance, created for him by Aqua Current.

  “Ngaah!”

  With a brief battle cry, Haruyuki was about to shoot forward the remaining ten meters when Argon, afterglow lingering in the lenses of her headpiece, turned toward him. The lips beneath the goggles curled up into a grin.

  The lenses of the oversize goggles he’d thought of as nothing but glasses shone a dazzling purple.

  …No way. It’s not just the hat. She has lasers in her eyes, too.

  This flash of foreboding in Haruyuki’s brain did indeed turn into two bright lines jetting out with a violent, high-frequency whine. Evasion: Impossible. Defense: Also impossible.

  —Don’t be afraid! Repel it!!

  He couldn’t have heard the voice of his parent and Legion Master, Kuroyukihime, in reality.

  The time it took for the laser to shoot across the ten meters between them and reach him was not even one-tenth of a second. And, although it was true that Kuroyukihime had dived into this field as part of the Gallery, given that she had stayed behind somewhere in Koenji’s Look Street outdoor shopping mall a fair ways off, it wasn’t as though her voice could have reached him there.

  Even so, Haruyuki obeyed the voice that filled his head and spread his wings to decelerate while crossing his arms in front of his body. At the same time, the two lasers, drawing out parallel lines a few centimeters apart, slammed up against the armor of his arms.

  Earlier, when he had been shot in the right shoulder, her lasers had somehow or another cut through the metal of his armor like butter, causing serious damage. But this time, Haruyuki felt a pushing resistance, and the superheated energy turned into a large ball, stopping in front of his arms. The armor there was, in fact, the toughest part of Crow’s body, along with his helmet. But resisting a laser was not simply a defensive power.

  It was the ability he had learned a mere day earlier to avoid—no, bend—all types of laser attacks. The name: Optical Conduction. He shouldn’t have been able to come close to using it in an actual battle; he’d only succeeded in activating it once. And that was half in a trance, so he almost didn’t remember how to move, how to bend the laser. He had actually completely forgotten that he had activated the ability, even after the Battle Royale started, until that very moment. But there was no doubt this was the last card he had to play.

  “Nngh…unh…” Mustering every drop of mental power he had, Haruyuki resisted the lump of ultra-high energy trying to burn him to a crisp.

  No, that’s not right.

  It’s not about resisting; accept the light, guide it, release it. Rather than just creating a physical wall to reject it, interrupt it with a path leading to another world. That’s the mirror mind I arrived at. The Way of the Flexible against light…

  Casting aside his fear, Haruyuki loosely opened his clenched fists and imagined both arms, from sharp fingertips to elbows, as two light-guiding tubes.

  Kashak, kashak. The guards on his arms transformed. It opened to each side from a centerline, and from the gap, long, slender crystals gradually rose up. The energy of the lasers that had been held in a ball state flowed into the rod-shaped crystals to the left and right to form a glittering X.

  “…Sheeaaah!” Shouting, Haruyuki yanked his arms sharply to his sides.

  The energy released from the crystalline rods flew into the space behind him, cutting two large holes in the snow-heavy clouds before disappearing.

  Now that she’d watched her special-attack lasers be repelled with zero damage, the smile finally disappeared from Argon’s mouth. The lenses on her hat, apparently finished recharging early, began to shine once more.

  If she alternated between shooting the lasers from her goggles and her hat, in theory, the lag between shots would shrink down to 1.5 seconds. Haruyuki’s Optical Conduction ability was 100 percent resistant to laser attacks, but if he was taking hits at that interval, it would be difficult to repel them all.

  Krk.

  A hard sound came at him. But it wasn’t the launch of the laser.

  It was the sound of a lance of ice flying in from the opposite side of the road and plunging deep into the left lens of Argon’s hat.

  “Ack…!” the Analyst let slip, reeling. The charging energy inside the hat exploded, shattering the left lens and sending tiny pieces flying. This was apparently the weak point of the powerful weapon; Argon’s health gauge dropped more than 20 percent.

  Now! This was his last chance!

  “…!” Without a moment’s delay, Haruyuki beat his wings with everything he had. Silver Crow’s body shot up like a coiled spring and closed in on the off-balance avatar. If he could just catch hold of her to keep her from moving, that should decide the battle.

  Five meters left…three…His outstretched fingers were about to finally touch the Analyst’s thin armor.

  “Razzle Dazzle,” Argon muttered, and three lenses—the one left in her hat and the two in her goggles—shone with an incredible amount of light. But they weren’t lasers. Just a pure, white light illuminating a broad radius.

  Haruyuki had no sense of damage. His health gauge and its remaining 10 percent were untouched. But bathed in light at close range, his field of view was dyed white, and all he could see was a hazy view of his gauge and the counter display. Since he was pretty sure dazzle was an English word for blind, it was probably a blinding technique with no direct-attack power, just like the name suggested. But the ability to completely rob an opponent of their vision was perhaps even more powerful than the Yellow King’s special attack Silly-Go-Round.

  “Nngh…!” Haruyuki suppressed the reflexive urge to put his head down, and he spread both hands wide and tried to catch Argon with a shot in the dark. But the fingertips of his left hand simply grazed some part of her, and he charged into the icy roof of the building face-first.

  “Heh-heh, trying to push me down? You’re way out of yer league, boyo.”

  With only those murmured words lingering in the air, any sign of Argon vanished from his senses.

  Fortunately, his vision was quick to recover, so Haruyuki sat up and intently peered into the blur the area had become, but there was already no sign of the Analyst. The guide cursor that was displayed once again pointed toward Wolfram Cerberus, who was still lying on Oume Highway below him.

  Since entry into buildings wasn’t permitted in an Ice stage, Argon shouldn’t have been able to escape the battlefield so easily, and yet…

  Wondering at this while refusing to give up, Haruyuki was whirling his head around when he heard a voice coming at him from nowhere:

  “Two people with light defense abilities tires even me out. How ’bout we call it a day? Time’s almost up anyway.” Just as she said, the time remaining had, in the blink of an eye, dropped to a hundred seconds. Her laughter-filled voice came to him on the cold breeze, receding rapidly. “So we’ll play again, Crow. And…darling Curren, too.” And then Argon Array’s health gauge disappeared without a sound from the stack in t
he right of his field of view.

  The reckoning of points in Battle Royale mode was a complicated calculation involving several elements, such as participant level, the values of damage taken and given, and kill bonuses. What could be said about this duel was that Haruyuki had done some serious damage to Cerberus, but he had also taken about the same from Argon, so he broke even. And although Argon had mercilessly shaved away the gauges of Haruyuki, Ash, and Cerberus, she’d been hit hard by the level-one Aqua Current, so she was also at zero gain.

  As for Current, she’d had 20 percent of her health gauge shaved away by Argon’s lasers, but she’d also broken one of Argon’s lenses with her ice lance, doing about the same amount of damage, so taking the level difference into consideration, she should have taken some number of points from Argon—meaning that she’d succeeded magnificently in following through on her initial declaration of intent.

  With these calculations racing through the back of his mind, Haruyuki finally recovered his vision and sought out Aqua Current. But she was nowhere to be found on the roof she had occupied until only moments before.

  No way. First Argon Array disappears, and now her? But I have so many things to ask her. No, before that, I need to thank her for saving me. Still squatting on the roof, Haruyuki was about to call out her name, but before he could, a voice came from behind him:

  “Nice fight.”

  “Huh?” Whirling around on his knees, Haruyuki found the unmistakable avatar with the unique flowing-water armor standing before him. Beneath the membrane of babbling water, pale eye lenses shone faintly. “Uh! Um! I, um, well!”

  Just a little over eighty seconds remaining. Unable to immediately decide what should come out of his mouth, Haruyuki flapped both arms from his formal sitting position and simply rattled on in whatever direction his heart took him. “I-I’m sorry! You came and stepped up for me in the fight and almost pressed her up against a wall, and then I went and got taken down by a blinding technique…”

  Faced with the sudden apology, Current let the glimmer of a smile slip through. She shook her head with a splashing sound. “No, you fought well. Blinding you and then running off is her specialty. That’s just how it goes. And if you had pushed Arra—I mean, the Analyst—any further, she might have pulled a sudden death on you with an Incarnate attack. In this situation, she wouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

  “I-I-Incar…” Even if there was no one within hearing range, Haruyuki snapped to attention upon hearing this forbidden word.

  Seeing his reaction, Current smiled again. “Anyway, Crow, I think you still have something you have to do in this battlefield. Something Argon Array wanted to prevent so badly she stopped her watching and challenged you personally.”

  “Huh…O-oh!” Right, it was just like Current had said. Immediately before his wing had been ripped through by the sudden appearance of Argon, Haruyuki had been trying to communicate something very important to the genius Burst Linker Wolfram Cerberus, who’d arrived on the scene so abruptly in the Accelerated World.

  “R-right. Excuse me. I’ll apologize properly later!” Haruyuki shouted, bowing at Current before racing away, almost falling over himself. Without hesitation, he leapt from the roof of the building into an unstable glide with his injured wings. Once he’d landed in the middle of Oume Highway, he lifted up Cerberus from where he still lay on the ground.

  The smaller avatar had yet to regain consciousness. Haruyuki looked over at Ash Roller a little ways off; his frenemy was now recovered from the stun effect and was wailing before the remains of his bike (“Noooooo! My glorious machiiiiiiiiine!”), so Haruyuki figured that Cerberus’s unconsciousness was not due simply to damage taken.

  There was a good possibility that this was a sign of the personality change that had happened in their last duel, but it wasn’t just his helmet; the armor on both shoulders was also silent. After looking up and seeing that they only had forty seconds left on the clock, Haruyuki steeled himself and started shaking the other boy. “Cerberus! Wake up, Cerberus!”

  Haruyuki would still be fine if the one that awakened was the Cerberus II of the left shoulder, but he didn’t know what would happen if Cerberus III—the currently unconfirmed personality Argon called “Onesie”—in the right shoulder (or so he assumed) ended up coming out. But if he let this chance get away, it was totally unclear when he’d be able to contact Cerberus next. And he had no guarantee that even if they did meet again, he would be the first personality, Cerberus I.

  “Cerberus…!!” He couldn’t be sure that his earnest cries actually reached the boy. But a faint light blinked beyond the wolf’s maw visor of his helmet. At the same time, the body encased in tungsten armor began to shiver.

  “…Crow…”

  The voice that finally slipped out was unmistakably that of the Cerberus I Haruyuki had now fought three times.

  He pushed back a sigh of relief. “Cerberus, there’s no time left! But I want to talk with you more! Please, as soon as this duel ends, disconnect globally to keep Argon Array from challenging you, and”—he shook off a momentary hesitation and mustered up the next words—“come to this spot in the real world, the Oume Highway entrance to Look Street! I’ll be waiting for you there!!”

  “…”

  Cerberus didn’t respond right away. He simply stared at Haruyuki’s face without nodding or showing any other kind of reaction. But Haruyuki distinctly felt a swell of powerful emotion seeking release in the small metallic avatar. In the upper part of his field of view, the counter mercilessly sliced the time away. Twenty seconds left. Fifteen. When the digital readout entered the single digits, Haruyuki nodded deeply at the still-silent Cerberus and turned his face to the sky—and then set his eyes on a completely unexpected sight:

  Aqua Current, the flowing-water duel avatar, still on the roof of a building on the south side of Oume Highway. And then, on the northern side roof that Current had originally occupied, a lone jet-black silhouette stood silently.

  Swords for all four limbs; skirt patterned after a lotus. Mask in the sharp shape of an inverted V, crowning a slender, supple body. Haruyuki’s parent and the master of Nega Nebulus, the Black King, Black Lotus.

  Having registered Silver Crow on her spectator list, she’d dived automatically into this battlefield as a member of the Gallery when the surprise Battle Royale had started. But even if she were only a spectator with no fear of being attacked, it was risky for a king to reveal herself without a full understanding of the situation, so she had remained at the north of the shopping street where they had materialized in the Accelerated World.

  And yet now, she had appeared in such a conspicuous place, albeit only for the few remaining seconds. The reason for that was…

  As Haruyuki stared upward, bewildered, Kuroyukihime raised her right arm smoothly. But not at Haruyuki.

  The sharp tip of the Terminate Sword was pointing at Aqua Current. But this gesture held not the slightest hint of hostility; on the contrary, it looked like an expression of Kuroyukihime’s heart, a desire to cross the ten-meter limit for distance between duelers and spectators and move closer. Or perhaps, more accurately, a desire to touch her directly.

  Perhaps feeling the same thing, Aqua Current also raised her right hand and turned a fingertip with a thin line of water flowing down it toward Black Lotus.

  A faint part opened in the gloomy clouds filling the sky of the stage, and a thin ray of evening light made the obsidian and water duel avatars shine the same shade of orange.

  A second later, the counter hit zero, and the words TIME UP!! quietly burned before Haruyuki’s eyes.

  2

  The instant he returned to the real world, the commotion of the shopping arcade closed in all around him, and Haruyuki unconsciously squeezed his eyes shut.

  Koenji Look Street reached north from the Oume Highway intersection next to Umesato and stretched almost all the way to Koenji Station. And it was a shopping area with history: Buildings were crammed together on both sides
of the pedestrian road, which was paved with brick-like permeable tiles, and had everything from ancient bodegas to cafés and galleries and the game shops Haruyuki so often frequented, so when night fell, it was busy with shoppers even on weekdays.

  Haruyuki leaned up against a streetlamp/social camera pillar and fumbled with his Neurolinker to cut his connection to the global net. When he let out a long sigh, he felt a hand on his head—followed by a voice in his ear.

  “Well done. That was an impressive fight against a level eight.”

  His eyes snapped open, but before him, of course, was the beauty of Kuroyukihime, the Umesato student council vice president and Haruyuki’s parent. Just like when Haruyuki fought hard in the Territories every weekend, she had a gentle, proud smile on her face. But he sensed that there was another, separate emotion hiding beneath it. Sadness—no, a sorrow—for something lost that could never be regained.

  “…Kuroyukihime…” With her hand still on his head, Haruyuki stared into her eyes. The last scene of the long Battle Royale was still burning in the back of his mind—the two Burst Linkers on either side of the main road, hands outstretched toward each other. Considering that one was a level-nine king and the other a level one, it was hard to believe they had such a deep friendship, but the sight had been something like two sisters forced to live apart.

  “…Um, Kuroyukihime. Aqua Current in the Battle Royale just now…”

  “…Mmm…” The instant Haruyuki quietly uttered the name, Kuroyukihime lowered her right hand and dropped her eyes.

  Seeing the look on her face, he hesitated for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on. In his head, all kinds of questions whirled endlessly round and round—“Do you know her?” “I’ve heard her name before,” “How can a level one be that strong?”—and eventually a card with “Why did she help me and Cerberus?” popped up. Only then did Haruyuki finally remember the important promise he’d made.