Silver Crow’s greatest ability, flight, was suddenly locked away, and Haruyuki slumped down.
“The intensity of your highs and lows hasn’t changed at all,” Akira said in a voice that contained the slightest of smiles. “It’s okay; I’ll investigate.”
“Uh…um, how…?”
Without responding, Aqua Current walked over to the nearest manhole and kicked at the edge of the rusted cover from directly above. Kwaaan! A metallic sound rang out, and the round cover bounced up and rolled onto the street. The hole that appeared was probably a meter or so in diameter. When Haruyuki listened closely, he could hear the heavy burbling of water flowing.
Aqua Current held her right hand above the hole and turned her fingers downward. When she did, two or three liters of the water racing around her body poured down and disappeared into the manhole.
“Uh, um, just what…?” Not comprehending, Haruyuki opened his eyes wide. As a phenomenon, it looked like Current was simply throwing part of her valuable flowing-water armor into the sewer. The amount was about 10 percent, but the membrane of water covering her body was obviously thinner.
“Just leave it to Ren,” Utai calmly offered, beside him.
The silent Current lifted her face. “The enemy team is approaching through the sewers,” she announced matter-of-factly. “All three are moving together in a group. They’ll reach the center of the stage in a few minutes.”
“What?! H-how do you know that?!”
“The ability Hydro Auditory. Everything in the liquid my water is mixed in with is in my ears. I’ll tell you the rest as we move,” Current stated smoothly, and then she threw herself without hesitation into the manhole at her feet. Rather than using the ladder, she simply slid down the wall inside and disappeared in the blink of an eye.
“So…w-we really will have to fight down there…”
“But this isn’t a bad development. If they’re moving properly underground without smashing the walls aboveground with Incarnate techniques, the possibility that they’re parasitized by ISS kits is lower. And in the middle of a Territories stage…”
At Utai’s words, Haruyuki steeled himself and nodded. “That’s where the strongest base is. It’ll be annoying if they occupy it first…Okay, Mei! Let’s get moving, too.” He stretched out his right arm and lifted up Ardor Maiden’s petite form before taking a few steps forward and jumping into the manhole.
Although it was the first time he’d had a Territory Battle in this stage, that didn’t mean he had no experience with the Sewer stage itself. He had memorized the depth of the manholes and the internal structure. They were in free fall for about ten meters in the pitch-black, vertical hole, and then when they came out into a wide, gloomy space, he spread the wings on his back and braked. Silver Crow glided, carving out a spiral, and landed in the water with a splash next to Aqua Current, who had preceded them.
They were in an enormous underground tunnel with a semicircle cross section like a kamaboko fish cake; it was probably six or seven meters in diameter. The floor and walls were the same concrete as the world aboveground, but they were covered entirely with a mysterious mucus—maybe mold, maybe moss—and the metal pipes of various sizes were cruelly rusted. For lighting, there were only the old-style fluorescent tube lights attached to the ceiling, and in the darkness where the light didn’t reach, small, unidentifiable creatures darted about.
A thin layer of water was flowing along the level floor, but it was actually a disgusting, muddied gray color, and just being sunk into it up to the ankles was extremely damaging mentally. If the day came when you tripped and fell into it face-first, you would inevitably faint in agony—or Haruyuki had experienced as much.
You will absolutely not fall today! Resolving himself, Haruyuki asked Maiden, his right arm still wrapped around her, “Um, Mei, can I put you down…maybe?”
“…If I said no, would you hold me the whole time?”
“Huh? W-well, until we encounter the enemy…”
“That’s a good idea.” The words had no sooner come from his left than Akira was also leaning into him, so Haruyuki reflexively lifted her with his left arm. But no matter how small the F-type avatars might have been, lifting two of them at the same time did put a certain load on him.
“Uh, uh, if I run like this, there’s a fairly good chance that I’ll trip and splash in face-first…”
“It’s okay. Smash that.”
When he looked in the direction of Current’s pointing finger, he did indeed see a cylindrical silhouette enshrined there, almost lost in the darkness. The Sewer stage bonus item: the oil drum. He approached it carefully so that he wouldn’t trip, and when he pulverized it with a single kick, a mysterious luminescent gas wafted out and illuminated their surroundings for a few moments. Bathed in this, the three avatars watched their special-attack gauges jump to nearly half-full.
“All right. Now I can fly to the center of the stage carrying both of you!”
“Please. My Hydro Auditory’s about to run out. I expect the enemy team will reach the center…in another minute and thirty seconds.”
“That’s plenty of time!” Haruyuki shouted as he deployed the metal wings on his back. It took mental energy to fly in a confined space, but if they could trace the enemy’s position, he didn’t need to be careful of surprise attacks, so he could go pretty fast. He lightly vibrated his wings, and once his feet were a couple dozen centimeters about the muddy water, Haruyuki started flying parallel. The straight part of the tunnel ended in the blink of an eye, and a bifurcation to either side appeared ahead of them.
“Right,” Akira murmured in his ear before he could slacken his speed.
“Roger!” He inclined his body and went into a high-speed, right-angle turn, his specialty. The tip of his wing dipped in and out of the water surface, grazing it, and columns of water rose up behind them, one after another.
“It’s like a movie!” Utai said from his right arm, voice tinged with just the slightest bit of excitement.
Hearing this, Haruyuki wanted to go even faster, but it wouldn’t serve their purpose for him to come into contact with a wall because he was going too fast and dump all three of them into the sludge. Hurry carefully, he told himself.
He continued turning right and left, following Akira’s directions, and when they had flown for less than a minute, he could see a bright light up ahead. The blue color of it, closely resembling that of the special-attack gauge, was not a fluorescent light, but the light effect emitted by the base.
“That’s the center,” Akira noted. “The enemy team will be here in a few more seconds.”
“We’re going in!” he shouted as he spread out both wings wide and applied the brakes. Dropping speed, they flew out of the tunnel and into a round, underground space.
Sewer tunnels like the one they had come through met from all directions here, forming a gray lake in the center. The space was fifty meters across and probably thirty meters high, up to the ceiling of the dome. In the middle of the lake was a small concrete island, and on this floated a metal ring shining with blue light. Rotating slowly, emitting a strange vibration, this ring was the “foothold” specific to a Territories stage. Inside the ring, a player’s special-attack gauge was automatically charged, so the basic strategy of the Territories was to occupy the foothold somehow, defend it if you did manage to occupy it, or attack if it was occupied.
The foothold in the center of the stage was known as the “stronghold,” a charging ring larger than any of the other footholds. If they were small, three avatars could charge at the same time—although the recovery speed would slow down a bit—so whether this ring could be taken was often directly connected to victory or loss. Thus, Haruyuki started to fly to the small island in the center of the lake to occupy the still-deserted stronghold. But.
“Dodge!” At the same time as Akira’s sharp voice rang out, something flew in from the tunnel on the opposite side at high speed. Oval and straight line and arc formed of bright
red flames—it was an eighth note.
“Whoa!” Crying out, he turned sharply to the right and dropped down. The sparks, scattering from the flaming musical note, bounced off Silver Crow’s armor in several places, but the heat resistance of his metal color proved a boon, and there was no damage.
The note carved out a loosely curving trajectory and flew off behind them. When it hit the concrete wall, it split into four thirty-second notes before forming an enormous vortex of flame.
Catching this on the edge of his field of view, Haruyuki fully braked on the verge of landing in the water. Unable to reach the foothold, he descended into the lake about twenty meters ahead of it. His feet were once more swallowed up by the muddy water, but in this situation, he obviously couldn’t waste his time with feelings of visceral disgust. Akira and Utai jumped down from Haruyuki’s arms and spread out to either side of him.
“…That technique just now, I’m pretty sure it was, um…”
The answer Haruyuki was trying to dig out of his memory came from the small duel avatar who leapt forcefully out of the tunnel he was facing. “So you dodge my Searing Note with no damage! You’re a real piece of work!” Paying no mind to the filth at her feet, the avatar ran splashing forward and stopped in a position where she created an isosceles triangle with Haruyuki and his friends and the floating island of the foothold as the triangle’s feet. She spun around twice there before striking a pose with her left hand on her side and her right thrust up into the air.
Her entire body was colored a fairly vivid, long-distance red. Of course, she wasn’t as saturated as the Red King, Scarlet Rain, but in the gloom of the underground space, the orange-scarlet stood out sharply. The armor of her upper body was in the shape of a blazer with a necktie, while that of her lower body was a miniskirt, and her head, with two long pigtails dangling down, was equipped with large ribbons on either side.
Haruyuki had seen this avatar, somehow reminiscent of an ancient cyber idol, before, albeit only two or three times in the Nerima area duel Galleries. “…Blaze Heart…”
Haruyuki’s voice as he uttered her name was a little hoarse, reflecting the anxiety and tension in his body.
Now that he was facing her directly, there was no longer any room for doubt. She was definitely a member of the Red Legion, Prominence. So then the problem was whether this battle was of her own volition or not.
Haruyuki took a step or two forward as he stared at Blaze’s body, still in her trademark pose, as if to devour it. The chest armor patterned after a blazer was split to either side, exposing the naked body of the avatar within. If she were parasitized with an ISS kit, it would have been right there. He concentrated, squinting hard to seek out the jet-black semisphere he had witnessed any number of times.
Perhaps sensing his gaze beyond Crow’s mirrored goggles, Blaze Heart slapped both hands over her chest and shouted, “Wh-what’re you staring at?! Sorry for being hella flat-chested!”
“Huh?! N-no, that’s, I wasn’t—”
“Whaaaat?! So then, you some kind of perv who likes washboards?! Now that you mention it, your comrades’ve got nothing going on upstairs, either!!”
At this from Blaze, he just barely managed to suppress the unconscious urge to look at Maiden and Current’s chests. Haruyuki mustered up all his willpower and fixed his eyes firmly in front. “N-no, that’s not it. It’s not that I like flat chests or whatever!”
“That’s right!” Utai’s crisp voice followed in declaration. “Crow doesn’t like breasts; he likes legs!!”
“Right, that’s exactly— N-no, no, no!!”
“Hmm, that so? I’ll make a note of it,” Akira mentioned to his left, and Haruyuki wanted to run away.
But fortunately, before he could put that plan into action, Utai murmured at a volume that their opponent could not hear, “From Blaze’s behavior, she doesn’t seem to have been parasitized by the kit. I can’t confirm a kit visually, either.”
“Y-yeah…you’re right. But then the problem is…” When Haruyuki had gotten that far, Blaze’s two comrades chased in after her, sending water droplets flying everywhere, and came to a stop.
On the right was a yellowish-brown M-type avatar equipped with enormous claws on each sturdy arm. And on the left was a pale peach–colored F-type carrying a parasol-shaped Enhanced Armament as tall as she was. Ochre Prison and Peach Parasol—both Burst Linkers were also members of Prominence.
Haruyuki diligently but as casually as possible looked over their chest armor, but he couldn’t see ISS kits on either one of them. When Blaze Heart brought her arms back down from in front of her body, he gave voice to the question swirling around in his heart.
“…You’re all in Prominence, right? So why?! Us and Promi, we have an unlimited cease-fire. Or is this the will of the Red King—”
“It’s not Rain!” The idol-type avatar in the scarlet blazer didn’t let Haruyuki finish. “We’re the ones who decided to attack!” Her high-pitched cry was clearly tinged with anger. Peach Parasol also raised her voice with “That’s right! Exactly!” and Ochre Prison opened and closed the claws of both hands, making a rasping sound.
Apparently, something had happened that Heart and her comrades could not stomach—to the point where they would break the truce prescribed by the Red King—sending them here to challenge Suginami in the Territories that day. But Haruyuki had absolutely no clue as to the details of that “something.”
When it came to incidents involving Nega Nebulus and Prominence, there was basically only the Fifth Chrome Disaster at the beginning of the year. But at that time, the Master, aka Niko, had set up some social engineering centered on Haruyuki, and none of the other Legion members had made an appearance. When the incident with Dusk Taker had happened in April, Niko and her deputy Pard had helped Haruyuki and Takumu, and they had maintained friendly relations ever since—or rather, the two of them were simply precious friends. So Haruyuki had a feeling of closeness to the Red Legion itself, and even if their opportunities for exchange were few, he had absolutely no memory of ever taking action hostile to its members. So he couldn’t even imagine what had so enraged Blaze Heart and her comrades.
He glanced to either side, and both Utai and Akira lightly shook their heads. If they didn’t know what was going on either, the only thing to do was simply ask directly. “Um, what’s the reason for this? Did we do something to Pro—?”
“Of coooooourse you did!!” Blaze Heart screamed, her round and cute eye lenses shining a blue reminiscent of high-temperature flames. “You’re not going to tell me you forgot about yesterday! I mean, after you tried to get the Red King, Scarlet Rain, stuck in an EK with a super-huge Legend-class Enemy when she was leading the hunt! There were twenty or more of us in Promi out hunting Enemies in the Toooooshima area of the Unlimited Neutral Field!”
“Wha— Wha—?!” Haruyuki threw his head back and then fiercely shook it, waving his hands from side to side as well. “W-we didn’t! We wouldn’t do that!”
Next to Heart, Peach Parasol’s eyes shone sharply. “That’s a bold-faced lie! Me and Heart and Och, we all tooootally saw it!” she cried, holding the umbrella-type Enhanced Armament in both hands and spinning it at high speed. Then the parasol stopped spinning and was turned forcefully toward Haruyuki as she set her sights on him with the gun muzzle in the tip. “It’s true you guys weren’t there, but…instead, she was riding on the back of a Legend class! Your Master! The Black King, Black Lotus!” Her voice, burning with anger, shot through Haruyuki’s chest like a bullet from a large-caliber rifle.
Even after the echoes created by the large underground dome faded and disappeared, Haruyuki couldn’t react. Ardor Maiden took a step forward instead and called back in her clear voice, “That’s not possible! Lotus would never launch a surprise attack like that. And to attack using an Enemy! She just wouldn’t!”
“Shut it! Shut up shut up shut uuuuuuup!!” The cry that gushed out of Blaze Heart had thrown off the sweetness of the idol and was someh
ow colored with grief. She clenched both her hands in front of her, and her small body shook violently as she continued to push the words out. “She did it, though! Two and a half years ago…a cowardly surprise attack on the previous Red King! Red Rider! She killed him, didn’t sheeeee?!”
“…!”
Haruyuki suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe, and he unconsciously pressed a hand to his chest. He tried to take in the virtual air, but the sensation of his throat being blocked wouldn’t leave. He absolutely could not believe that Black Lotus—that Kuroyukihime—would have planned a surprise attack in the Unlimited Neutral Field on the Red Legion with a Legend-class Enemy, but it was a fact that she had caught the former Red King in a surprise attack and forced him to total point loss. There were many threads leading up to that tragedy, but Haruyuki didn’t have the time or the right to explain them all.
This time, neither Utai nor Akira moved to refute the claim. Blaze Heart lowered her voice just the slightest bit and said to the silent members of Nega Nebulus, “…The second Red King, Scarlet Rain, also took part in the Enemy hunt yesterday. The Black King simply set a Legend class on her and disappeared, but it was obvious that if Rain had gotten into a tight spot, she would have shown up again to try to land the killing blow.”
Hearing this, Haruyuki finally pushed aside tightness in his throat and asked, “S-so then, Rain…the Red King’s okay, right?!”
“Of cooooourse! ’Cos we were there with her! And as if we’re gonna let you kill our master ever again! Not one more tiiiiiiiime!!”
Upon Blaze’s declaration, Peach brandished her umbrella rifle, and Ochre snapped out the claws of both hands.
Haruyuki had been told that with the disappearance of the previous Red King two and a half years earlier, Prominence had been destroyed as a Legion. The former Promi members had split off into several groups and were locked in combat with the members of the small-and medium-size Legions that came to challenge them; it had apparently been something like the Warring States period of ancient times.
Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge Page 9