Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge

by Reki Kawahara

  The longbow was turned diagonally upward to launch a flame arrow. Once the arrow passed the peak of the parabola, it split into dozens more, transforming into a crimson rain on Peach Parasol’s head.

  “Waaah?!” she cried out, apparently snapped out of berserker mode. The folded plates enclosing the rifle body opened, and she hid herself under the Enhanced Armament, which was turned umbrella once again. A rain of flames poured down.

  The range of the technique was surprisingly small—the flame arrows didn’t reach as far as Haruyuki and Blaze—but being within its range was pretty awful. Of course, the ground was covered in water, but the arrows continued to burn even after they fell on the water surface. A large number of them also pierced Peach’s umbrella, and she was evidently in a burning hell.

  “Th-that’s Negabu’s Testarossa…” Blaze Heart’s trembling voice came from under him.

  “Huh? D-do you know her?” Haruyuki asked unconsciously.

  “Everyone at the midlevel of Promi’s heard the rumors. She’d fly in carried by the ICBM Sky Raker and then turn the field into a sea of flames with that technique. And then finally she’d drop down on the foothold, a fireball herself.”

  “Wh-whoa…” Trembling along with Blaze, he remembered now the stories he’d heard. The second Red King, Niko herself, had said that even she’d gotten into a world of hurt when Maiden had dropped down at close range during the Territories way back when. And it was true that if an avatar with that kind of firepower occupied the foothold, it would be a difficult job to get close to it, much less get it back.

  Immediately after he had this thought, Ardor Maiden completed the occupation of the foothold, and the metal ring was colored the Legion’s shade of black.

  “C, I’ll keep Peach in check!” Utai shouted to Haruyuki, pulling back her bowstring as it pointed at the sky.

  “I’ve got Ochre,” Akira’s voice added from a distance. “Crow, you two leaders settle this!”

  When Haruyuki glanced behind him, Aqua Current was toying with Ochre Prison, who flailed and slashed with his claws while she danced around at high speed like flowing water itself. If the two veterans were on top of the rest of the Prominence team, he wouldn’t have to worry about any simple counterattacks.

  Haruyuki met the eyes of Blaze Heart, who was still pinned beneath him. Silently, they reached a mutual understanding and pulled away from each other, bounding up from the muck.

  “Aaaall right…Now it’s for real, one-on-one, black and white—I mean, red and black, we’ll settle this!”

  “Wh-when you put it like that, it sounds like we’re already the losers. But this is just what I was hoping for!”

  Haruyuki readied himself, sending water droplets flying, and Blaze showed off her spin and pose once more. There weren’t even two meters between them, but he didn’t get the sense that his opponent was falling back.

  “You’re prob’ly thinking ‘hand-to-hand with a long-distance red’!” Hitting the nail on the head, Blaze let a grin rise up on her adorable face mask. “Let me tell you! Long-distance red is the red of flames! And the red of flames, well”—she pressed the mic in her right hand to her mouth and said, ridiculously loud—“is the red of hot bloooooood! Burning Heaaaaaaart!!”

  As her voice touched the bright red mic, sparks flew off and started to burn. Searing Note, the special attack Blaze has used twice up to that point, was a long-distance attack that generated flame notes from her voice. So Haruyuki reflexively moved out of the path of the mic.

  But what it produced this time was not a music note but an enormous heart, which shone so red it was dazzling. And this crumbled immediately after it was generated to wrap Blaze herself in an intense fire. The long pigtails also changed to flames and stood on end, undulating. Her eye lenses, which had been a sapphire color up to that point, turned into rubies.

  “Silver Crow!!” Transformed into the spirit of fire, Blaze Heart shouted in a voice tinged with a high-pitched, metallic edge, “If you believe in your master, then try to stop my fists with those feeliiiiiiings!!”

  As if unable to withstand the heat of that line, even the mic clutched in her right hand burned up, becoming a massive fire that enveloped her fist.

  The water on the ground around Blaze began to burble and boil. Wondering how an avatar could have this high of a temperature and still be all right, Haruyuki glanced at the enemy health gauge in the top right of his field of view and saw that she wasn’t, in the end, entirely okay. Blaze Heart’s gauge was decreasing with each passing second, meaning she was also burning herself with those flames.

  So then if I run around and dodge, she’ll eventually destroy herself?

  It would have been a lie to say the thought didn’t cross his mind. Or rather that, if this were a normal duel, a normal Territories match, Haruyuki wouldn’t have hesitated to do exactly that. But Blaze Heart and her comrades were enraged that their beloved leader had been set up for an Enemy kill, and they had attacked Suginami area to land just one blow—even though they knew they could never be victorious in an encounter with the Black King.

  In which case, running away was basically the same as confessing that the feelings of love he had for Kuroyukihime, his own Legion Master and parent, were inferior to the passion of Blaze and her comrades. It was emotion, rather than logic, that told Haruyuki this.

  “…Obviously I believe in her!!” he shouted, clenching his right hand into a fist, and he dropped his hips to ready himself. Naturally, since using the Incarnate system in any normal duel, including the Territories, was the greatest taboo, he couldn’t make his fist shine like Blaze’s, but even still, his focused battle spirit became a faint signal transmitted to the BB Imagination Control System, and something like a heat haze shimmered around his fist.

  Seeing Haruyuki brace himself, Blaze brought an MC’s grin across her face. “Thaaaat’s the spirit! No tricks…Here I cooooooome!!” Kicking up stagnant water, she charged at him in a straight line. Whirling around once, she launched her blazing fist into an impressively forceful right straight.

  At the same time, Haruyuki also leapt forward. In contrast to Blaze’s showy motion, he barely raised his arm. Instead, he simply drew back his fist and accelerated with a kick.

  The incandescent meteor of Blaze’s punch and the almost pure-white beam of light of Haruyuki’s carved out exactly the same trajectory and smashed into each other. A light effect of fire and light canceling each other out shimmered in the air, and a little after that, the impact wave shook the stage. The water below their feet turned hot and was pushed back by the pressure, revealing the concrete floor.

  However zealous an idol she might have been, Blaze Heart was still a long-distance type. Her striking power and armor strength were fundamentally different from those of Silver Crow, a close-range metal type. But while unable to push Crow’s fist back, Blaze’s did stop it solidly with the help of her special attack.

  In this situation, the advantage went to Blaze. Swallowed in flames, Crow’s fist instantly became red-hot, and his health gauge started to slowly decrease. He might have had the high heat resistance of the metal colors, but the melting point of silver was fairly low compared with that of iron or tungsten. If he stayed in direct contact like this, his armor would melt away, and not only his fist but the majority of his right arm would be blown off.

  “…Are you not moving because you’re sneering at my flames?! Or are you just an iiiiidiot?!” Blaze shouted, still in this contest of strength with Haruyuki, her tone triumphant and yet somehow slightly dissatisfied.

  “The latter!” he shouted back even through the scorching heat.

  Meeting her head-on like this and then continuing the pointless contest of strength was, strategically speaking, the height of folly. But this situation was precisely what Haruyuki wanted. From between clenched teeth, he squeezed out what voice he could. “But I know my parent, the Black King, would do this, too! ‘Throw clever retreats to the dogs; once you dive into the stage, the only thi
ng is to duel with all you have’…That’s her teaching!”

  “…!”

  Instantly, Blaze opened her crimson eye lenses wide.

  Haruyuki wanted to go further and tell her, Which is why the Black King would never incite an Enemy and then run off on her own, but he couldn’t communicate all his feelings with words alone. In the end, it was the fist. He had to tell Blaze with the battle spirit in his fists.

  The armor of his right hand passed the red-hot stage and glittered orange, apparently finally on the verge of melting. His health gauge dropped more quickly, already cut down to 70 percent.

  From here, it was next to impossible to push back Blaze’s enhanced fist. But in the back of Haruyuki’s brain lived a single image: That of a super-hard metal color who, despite being as small as Silver Crow, slammed dead-on into a large avatar and failed to retreat a single step. Wolfram Cerberus.

  The force of Cerberus’s punches and head butts wasn’t dependent only on the performance of the tungsten armor he was born with. The reason why it was so hard, so heavy, was that he put all of himself into his blows. Every ounce of energy the duel avatar produced was focused on the one point, the one moment of impact.

  What made this possible was his incredibly tough joints. Cerberus probably locked all the joints on his body in the moment of attack to become a single lump of metal that crashed into the enemy. It was a technique that was the polar opposite of the Way of the Flexible—the idea of making the entire body soft to accept and let flow the enemy’s attack—that Haruyuki had learned from Kuroyukihime. The so-called Way of the Stiff. That was what made Cerberus’s technique a knockout blow.

  Naturally, without the hardness and weight of tungsten or the same joint strength, Silver Crow couldn’t flat-out copy Cerberus’s Way of the Stiff. But even if it wasn’t possible with his whole body, he could definitely turn at least his right arm into a lump of steel for just a moment. Before he learned about the Incarnate system, Haruyuki had gouged the incredibly hard wall of a building in the Demon City stage with his bare hands, so Crow’s arms had to have that much hardness to them.

  Haruyuki turned his body slightly and stretched out straight the right arm that continued to fight Blaze’s punch. He brought his wrist, elbow, shoulder, and even the right wing extending from his shoulder blade into a single straight line, imagining passing a steel shaft through there. If his joints bent or warped even a tiny bit, his arm wouldn’t be able to completely endure the action and would break.

  Cerberus, I’m just going to borrow your technique, he murmured to the duel avatar with the wolflike head—no, to the younger boy he’d had a fleeting encounter with in the real—and abruptly stopped breathing. From his perspective, he had a few seconds before the armor of his right hand melted. This was his first and last chance.

  “Here I go, Blaze!!”

  Perhaps sensing the end of the contest was at hand even before Haruyuki shouted this, Blaze Heart also responded in a flash, “Come, Crow!!”

  Her flames burned noticeably brighter, and in that instant, Haruyuki kicked fiercely off the ground with both feet. At the same time, he forced the wings on his back to full power. A roar shook the air like the firing of a large-caliber rifle, and massive quantities of sparks scattered from Crow’s right wrist, elbow, and shoulder. But his arm did not bend or crumple; instead, it shot forward with a strength and speed on par with Cerberus’s iron fist or even Cyan Pile’s Pile Driver.

  The flames enveloping Blaze Heart’s fist cut a perfect circle into the air and then scattered just before the small avatar was bounced back from the force and crashed into the distant wall of the dome.

  Three minutes later.

  Peach Parasol, her umbrella Enhanced Armament full of holes from Ardor Maiden’s Flame Torrent; Ochre Prison, all the claws on both hands severed by an unknown technique of Aqua Current’s; and Blaze Heart, entire body burned to a crisp, got together in a line and bowed their heads at the same time, declaring in unison, “We give up!!”

  All six fighters had escaped from the dark, confined, slippery sewers and moved aboveground to Kanpachi Street. The time remaining was five minutes and a dozen or so seconds, and if the Territory Battle ended like this, it would be a victory for Haruyuki’s team from the combined value of their health gauges.

  Even so, Haruyuki maintained the bare minimum of caution that Burst Linker etiquette dictated as he returned a light bow. “Uh, um. GG—no, I mean, good game.”

  Hearing this, the three members of Prominence lifted their faces and exchanged glances before smiling together—although Haruyuki still didn’t know what were the eyes and what was the mouth in Ochre’s birdcage mask.

  Haruyuki didn’t understand the reason for their reaction, and seeing his perplexed face, Peach Parasol said on their behalf, “You get that Pard speak from Pard herself?”

  “Oh! R-right…Yeah, basically.”

  Pard, aka Blood Leopard, who made free use of all kinds of abbreviations not just within the game but in real-life conversation as well, was one of the Triplex, the senior executives of the Red Legion. Naturally, Peach and the others would have been hearing Pard-speak on a regular basis.

  All three of them relaxed their shoulders, and not letting the opportunity slip by, Haruyuki ever-so-timidly broached the taboo topic. “Um, about the Enemy kill in the Unlimited Neutral Field that you were talking about before the fight…”

  “You don’t have to say any more than that.” Blaze Heart raised her right hand and shook her head lightly. “To be honest, I’m still not particularly interested in accepting everything you say…I can’t believe there’s another duel avatar besides Black Lotus in the Accelerated World who’s that black and that pointed. But—” She cut herself off for a moment and dropped her gaze to her right hand, slowly closing it as if confirming the sensation of impact lingering there. “But I know at least that you completely believe in your own master. The way we believe in Scarlet Rain. So we’re gonna swallow a whole bunch of things right now. ’Cos our master told us to.”

  “Th-tha—” Haruyuki reflexively opened his mouth to thank her, and Blaze stopped him again with her right hand.

  “I can’t accept those words. Even setting aside the Enemy-kill issue, it’s an indisputable fact that Black Lotus pushed Red Rider to total point loss with a surprise attack. This alone we can’t forget, no matter what Rain and Pard say. So the three of us are never gonna be friends with your Nega Nebulus.”

  “…”

  Haruyuki resisted the urge to tell them that even with the Red Rider incident, there were circumstances the three of them didn’t know about. But just as Blaze had said, a fact was a fact. Kuroyukihime had taken the head of the former Red King in her desire to reach level ten. That had been her own choice, and the resentment and hatred that Blaze and her comrades had now was a result of that choice. Even her child, Haruyuki, couldn’t intervene in that fate from the sidelines. So he simply nodded silently.

  With the time remaining at two minutes, the three members of the Red Legion turned on their heels together. Territory Battles didn’t end until one of the teams was completely annihilated or thirty minutes had passed, but perhaps to indicate that they had nothing left to discuss, they intended to leave Kanpachi Road.

  “Tell us just one last thing,” Aqua Current called quietly to their receding backs. Blaze Heart stopped and finally looked back, pigtails swinging. “You said the Black King incited an Enemy to attack and then disappeared. Does that mean she ran off across the ground?”

  This question was apparently unexpected, and Blaze blinked her eye lenses, now light blue again, several times, before shaking her head quickly from side to side. “No. She jumped down from the back of the massive Enemy, and then it was like she plunged her entire body into the ground and disappeared.”

  6

  In the end, four teams came to attack the Suginami area in the Territories the fifth week of June. The breakdown was one team from Leonids, one from Great Wall, one from Pound Ba
g—the small Legion headquartered in Toshima Ward—and the one team from Prominence.

  The defensive team of Haruyuki, Utai, and Akira fought the attacking teams from Pound Bag and Prominence and won both matches. The team of Kuroyukihime and Fuko, short one person, also had perfect victories over the Blue and Green teams. Thus, the result was a win rate of 100 percent for the defending side in all areas, and the Nega Nebulus flag was protected. That said, they’d never actually been overcome since making the territory declaration the previous November.

  The reason Nega Nebulus, classified as a small Legion by the number of members, had managed to keep their win ratio in the Territories at 50 percent or more was, of course, because the Black King, the Legion Master with overwhelming attack power, took part in the defense herself. Although level differences were not an absolute wall in Brain Burst, level niners alone were indeed another class altogether. In order to defeat Black Lotus, with her sword limbs that could cut through any object just as her nickname of World End implied, the only thing to do was stop her from moving through some kind of nonphysical hold technique and then concentrate a large amount of long-distance firepower on her, but this was difficult in the Territories, where the number of people on the attacking side was restricted.

  Thus, in the current state of things, when the other Kings did not come themselves to attack, the areas that could possibly fall were limited to the ones Kuroyukihime was not defending. In fact, the three-person team of younger members (Haruyuki, Takumu, and Chiyuri) lost from time to time, but they usually managed a win rate of 50 percent with one win out of two, or two out of three, so while it was close, they did protect their flag. If they lost with a team that included two of the Four Elements, even if Kuroyukihime wasn’t there, Haruyuki saw that as his responsibility, since he was charged with leading the team in her absence.

  Thus, the instant they returned to the rear courtyard of Umesato Junior High when the time limit for that week’s Territories was up, Haruyuki slid down on the bench. “Haaah…Th-thank goodness…We didn’t lose…”