Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge

by Reki Kawahara

  “Information pressure” was Niko’s personal scale for measuring the fighting power latent in a duel avatar and the battle experience accumulated through the ability Vision Extension. With this power, she had seen that, of the Seven Kings of Pure Color, the Green King, Green Grandé, and the Blue King, Blue Knight, had information pressure that far surpassed that of the others.

  But Niko’s words now were what was surprising, because if the picture he had in his mind of the true identity of the fake Black Lotus was right, that avatar should have also had an information pressure on par with that of the Seven Kings.

  “Y-you couldn’t see it. So then that means that the black avatar was a level-one or -two newbie or something?”

  “…Hmm, when you put it like that, I feel like that’s not quite it, y’know. It’s like, even though they were there, they didn’t have a real body…Something like that…” Mumbling for a while with her arms crossed, Niko suddenly jerked her head up and glared at him again. “Hey, Crow! The way you’re talking, you do have some kind of idea, don’t you!”

  “Uh, umm, ummm…” Pulling back slightly, he wrestled with it for a few seconds, and then resigned himself. “Y-yeah. I’ll tell you. Everything I know. But it’s gonna be a super-long story, so let’s do it while we have supper…”

  Haruyuki was about to ask if frozen pizza was okay, but without letting him even start, Niko declared, “Curry!” Apparently, she had very much enjoyed the homemade curry and rice that had made an appearance at the curry party the other day (regardless of what she had said about it), but this request was difficult in the extreme.

  “N-no, that’s impossible, Niko. I mean, that curry, it was basically just Chiyu and Shinomiya who made it and all.”

  “I ain’t saying make the same thing. If you just chop up the stuff, boil it, put in the roux, something’ll work out…I’ll help, too, so let’s do it, big brother!”

  And with that exchange, the mission began, and when they had made it through the shopping phase and the cooking phase to complete something curry-like, the hands of the analogue clock in the living room had made it around to seven PM.

  Once two large plates of rice—he managed to at least get her to allow this to be from frozen stock—and a curry of only potatoes, carrots, onion, and chicken were set out on the table, Haruyuki double-checked something: “Um, Niko, today are you maybe…?”

  “Staying over.”

  “Y-you are?”

  I’m so glad this didn’t clash with the sleepover with Kuroyukihime and Master yesterday! This earnest thought in his head, Haruyuki joined Niko in a chorus of “Let’s eat.” He picked up a spoon, got a good balance of curry and rice on it, and timidly brought it to his mouth.

  “…O-oh! This is actually…”

  “…Huh. This totally works.”

  Impressed, they dug in with their spoons at the same time. For all that they had made a fairly simplified version of the preparation video displayed in the AR of the curry roux package, the fact that it tasted like a proper curry seemed amazing, but also totally natural.

  After thinking about this, Haruyuki finally remembered the present Niko had given him six months earlier at the time of the Fifth Chrome Disaster incident, and he cocked his head to one side as he scooped up a second spoonful. “Huh? But aren’t you actually good at cooking, Niko?”

  “…You can tell from just lookin’ at the carrot on that spoon I chopped there! No big diff from your cooking ability. You trying to pick a fight?!” Niko threatened to shift from Normal mode to Red King mode.

  “N-n-no!” Haruyuki hurriedly denied. “I mean, those cookies you gave me before were super tasty, so…”

  The instant she heard this, the furrow disappeared from the middle of Niko’s brow, and instead, her cheeks got just a little red. “D-don’t go saying that with a straight face! I-it’s that, right, sweets are different. I mean, Pard’s almost a pro, so I learned a bunch of stuff from her…”

  “Ohhh! Is that it…”

  Pard, aka Blood Leopard, the second-in-command of Prominence and something like Niko’s guardian, worked at a cake shop in Sakuradai, Nerima Ward. Haruyuki remembered her dashing figure riding her electric motorcycle still wearing her maid-style uniform.

  “So then Pard’s not just working the counter, but in the kitchen, too? Wow. I wonder if she’ll go that way in the future.”

  “Huh? What’re you talking about? Pard’s that shop’s—” For some reason, Niko clamped her mouth shut and smiled with satisfaction. “Well, whatevs. Anyway, my cooking skill’s limited to sweets, and just the easy ones at that.”

  “But those cookies were incredibly crunchy, yet so moist! They were really delici—”

  “I’m! Telling! You! Enough of that. Just eat before it gets cold!!” she shouted, and started moving her spoon rather forcefully.

  Haruyuki looked at her for a moment, smiling without even realizing it, before he, too, finally scooped up piles of chicken curry and stuffed his cheeks. The carrots and the potatoes were cut in awkward chunks and a little overdone, but it was several times more delicious than whatever frozen dinner he would have eaten by himself.

  When they had both had another plateful, the small pot was perfectly empty, so they worked together to clean up, took turns in the bath, and finished their homework sitting alongside each other on the sofa. Before they knew it, it was nine PM.

  Haruyuki usually went to bed around eleven, but since Niko was yawning mightily, he stood up, thinking that he’d go to bed early that day, too. The following day was finally the school festival, so it was best to get a good night’s sleep.

  “My mom won’t be home until tomorrow, so you can use her room,” Haruyuki said.

  “Wohaahkay,” Niko replied, with a second yawn in the middle, wearing a long T-shirt instead of pajamas, and obediently headed for his mother’s bedroom.

  They said good night to each other in the hallway, and when her small back had disappeared beyond the door, he let out a sigh before going into his own bedroom on the opposite side. He set the alarm clock by his bed with a voice command and flopped down onto his bed. He used to take off his Neurolinker when he went to bed, but recently, he’d been leaving it on a lot. He sometimes got calls from other Legion members while he was asleep, albeit very rarely; upon answering, he would be basically half-asleep and give strange replies, but even so, he wanted to respond to their calls. Haruyuki knew all too well the feeling of sudden helplessness in the middle of the night and the desire for a connection with someone.

  Thus, he turned out the lights, closed his eyes, and thought that the voice he heard just as his mind was sinking over the edge of sleep was an online voice call.

  “Hey, you already asleep, Crow?”

  “Ah…Mmm, mmm, I’m still awa…”

  “…So then I wanna talk.”

  “Shhure, go ahead…” Blinking his eyes in the darkness, he waited for the conversation supposedly over the network to continue.

  Fwump! The bed suddenly shook, and Haruyuki jumped about three centimeters into the air in surprise.

  “Nwah?! N-n-night-light on!” He hurriedly called for the night-light and turned to the left, where he found the unmistakable form of Niko. She was lying on her side on the bed, supporting her head with her right hand, and glaring at Haruyuki with a grumpy look on her face.

  Maybe it’s not a voice call, but a dive call? Is that Niko’s avatar? he thought with a head that still hadn’t reached full wakefulness, and he started to reach out to try touching it, but right before he did, he noticed the fresh scent of soap.

  You couldn’t set a smell for your avatar. This scent was also clearly that of the soap always used in the Arita bathroom, and there was no reason why Niko would go out of her way to re-create it. Which meant…

  “…Y-you’re real?”

  “O’course.”

  “…Wh-why…? Oh! Right, it’s okay. There are no monsters in my mom’s room.”

  “That ain’t it!” She slappe
d Haruyuki’s stomach with her left hand. “So, like, when I think about it, you didn’t tell me the first thing about what’s actually important?”

  “I-important…?” After staring intently at Niko’s face illuminated by the indirect, gentle orange light for a few seconds, Haruyuki finally remembered. He had indeed said a few hours earlier, before they made the curry, that it would be a long story so they should do it over supper. And that long story was about the mysterious black avatar who had attacked the Red King with a Legend-class Enemy.

  “Oh. Oh! Right! That’s right!” He sat up in bed and instinctively sat in the formal kneeling posture before bowing his head. “S-sorry! I forgot! I wasn’t trying to slip anything by you or anything. It was just, the curry was better than I thought it’d be, so I sort of went into a trance eating it. Of course I’ll tell you. So, um, anyway, we can just go to the living—”

  “Too much of a hassle. We can do it here like this.”

  Haruyuki was lifting himself off the bed when Niko cut him off and flopped over onto her back and closed her eyes.

  “Like this,” she says, but I mean…After a moment of internal conflict, Haruyuki had no choice but to sit up again. Now that he thought about it, they had slept next to each other in this very bed five days earlier. And someone might say that this was fine since it was the second time, but it was clearly not fine. However, given that this was the Red King, he also had the feeling that he couldn’t say no.

  “All that said, I actually have a fairly good idea of it myself,” Niko murmured abruptly, so Haruyuki put his thoughts on pause and looked to his side.

  Niko, red hair freed from her ribbons and spread out on the pillow she had liberated from him at some point, moved her lips with her eyes turned steadfastly toward the ceiling. “Not about the fake Lotus, though. Just about their objective. Probably had nothing to do with getting in the way of our Enemy hunting, or with hunting me, neither. Their aim was probably…to watch.”

  “W-watch…? You mean…observe?”

  “’Zactly. More precisely, assess the battle power…of the main power of Prominence, and of me, Scarlet Rain…” Niko’s face—the second Red King’s face—was the most severe he’d seen it since she’d appeared in the elevator lobby that day.

  Haruyuki swallowed hard and then confirmed in a hushed voice, “B-but, Niko, they said the black avatar in question dived into the earth and disappeared before the fight began…”

  “Yeah. They disappeared, but they prob’ly didn’t go anywhere. They were watching us fight that Enemy from somewhere nearby. Dammit! If I’d realized that right at the start, I wouldn’t have used it…”

  “Used it…? Wh-what?”

  “My Enhanced Armament…The power of Invincible I’ve kept hidden so far.”

  When he understood the meaning of those words, Haruyuki couldn’t stop himself from shivering. The origin of the nickname Immobile Fortress for the second Red King came, of course, from her massive figure when the many containers of weapons were fully deployed. This aggregate, given the name Invincible, was a collection of Enhanced Armament Niko had obtained gradually each time she leveled up, assessed to currently be the greatest long-distance firepower in the Accelerated World. Haruyuki had also fought against or alongside Rain in Fortress mode any number of times, so he himself had tasted her overwhelming power to an almost unpleasant degree.

  But from what she was saying now, that full armament deployment was not Rain’s total power. She meant there was still something beyond that.

  “Hidden…Power…What?” Haruyuki asked, unconsciously leaning forward.

  “Like I’d tell you, idiot,” Niko replied, naturally, but then continued with the faintest of smiles bleeding through. “That’s what I wanna say, but it’s got a little to do with you, too, so…Look, six months ago with the armor thing, you, me, Lotus, and the professor went to Ikebukuro and got caught in that ambush by the banana dude, right? That time, it was all fine that I called my Enhanced Armament, but that yellow guy was sticking to me, making me look bad.”

  “B-but we didn’t have any other choice. With that many people, I mean, what were we—?”

  “You know this world’s a little bit rougher than that! Can’t just say you didn’t have a choice and walk away! …So I went up the mountain and did a little more training. Learning from you, right…?”

  “Training? Wh-what kind…?”

  “Hints over! Anyway, yesterday, I used a secret trick to get my comrades away from that hella massive Legend-class Enemy, and they saw it. Worst case, they even recorded it.” She closed her mouth there and rolled over to face Haruyuki directly. “That’s all I got. So now you’ll tell me your story. About the true identity of that fake, shadowy Lotus.”

  “…Right, got it. At best, this is a guess, but…” Haruyuki moved to cancel his formal seating mode, but his legs were already asleep, and he just fell over. He thought about trying to get up one more time, but since Niko didn’t seem to particularly care, he stayed on his side on the bed, took a deep breath, and said it:

  “The name of the black duel avatar you saw is Black Vise. He calls himself the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, the group distributing the ISS kits in the Accelerated World.”

  “…Black Vise…,” Niko repeated quietly, and Haruyuki stared intently at her face.

  He had his reasons for keeping Vise’s name from Niko and Pard up to that point. He didn’t want to…and he was scared. That they would think that layered avatar with the same “black” color name had even the slightest relationship with his beloved Black King.

  “Niko.” Unable to stand the silence, Haruyuki opened his mouth again. “Do you know if a number of avatars have had the same color-name in Brain Burst…?”

  “…Far as I know, never been any with the same color crown, at least. Crow, you see this Black Vise’s name on his health gauge or the matching list?”

  “Uh, um…” He went back through the encounters he’d had up to that point in the back of his mind before shaking his head in small increments. “I didn’t. I’ve basically only run into Vice in the Unlimited Neutral Field. The one exception was the Hermes’ Cord race, but when he showed up that time, he disappeared again right away, so his gauge didn’t show up. None of us in Negabu have seen Vise’s name in a system display.”

  “Hmm, right. So then, as one possibility, the name Black Vise could just be what he calls himself rather than his real avatar name.”

  “Whaaat?! You mean…he just went and took ‘black,’ a pure color for his name?!”

  “If that’s true, it’s more than just naming himself. It’s on the level of taking a title.”

  Tch! Niko clicked her tongue lightly before she turned her sharp gaze past Haruyuki’s bulk. Following her eyes, he took in the complicated shadows the pale light of the night coming in through the window cast upon the built-in bookshelf. He brought his gaze back and started to explain again.

  “…Black Vise can freely change the shape of the thin panels of his body and has the ability to create shadow images of other avatars. I was almost fooled by him when he took on the shape of Kuroyukihime. And he also has the ability to sink into any shadow in a stage and travel freely within it. So what you guys saw, this avatar jumping from the back of the Enemy and piercing the earth—”

  “Wasn’t him opening up a big hole in the stage, but just sinking into the shadow. That it?”

  “Yeah. So I think it’s plenty possible for him to have moved through the shadows and observed your battle from up close. On top of that, with the power of his brain implant chip, he can voluntarily decelerate his perceptions. So I think he was waiting to ambush you guys in the Unlimited Neutral Field.”

  “Is that…right. So it was that…Acceleration Research Society.” Niko nodded, and the tension gradually drained from her body. She flopped over onto her back, and after a few seconds, she started to speak in a murmur. “…So the color crown stuff from before. I…I’ve thought about this a whole b
unch of times, y’know. Like, if there’s not some kind of item that can change your color.”

  “Ch-change your…color…?”

  “It’s not like I’m bored of long-distance attacks, so I wanna be blue, or I wanna be yellow ’cos I wanna give support or anything. It’s just…like, if my color was just a little more concentrated, y’know. From Scarlet…to pure Red.”

  “N-Niko…?” Haruyuki was so stunned, all he could do was say her name.

  The color given to a duel avatar was not randomly decided by the system. The BB program pulled up a deep image of yourself and represented that as a single color. Thus, the color name was, in a certain sense, equivalent to a real name for a Burst Linker. And Niko had basically just said she rejected the color of her own heart.

  Now she curled up on the bed and hung her head. Her lips trembled, and then an even fainter voice spilled out from them. “…Six months ago, to liberate the Armor of Catastrophe, the Yellow King called me out and tried to banish me from the Accelerated World using the level nine sudden-death rule. What do you think his reason, his motive was…?”

  “That’s— So that he can get to level ten himself, of course…”

  “Prob’ly not. No matter what he says, in his heart, he doesn’t want to go near level ten. He was just hunting me because I’m an eyesore. That’s all.”

  “But…Prominence and the Yellow Legion, CCC, are in the west and east of Tokyo. You guys don’t even have any adjacent territory.”

  “What’s in his way is not Promi, but me personally. Radio—he can’t stand it. That I—not Red, but Scarlet—would call myself a King of Pure Color. And probably, the other kings more or less think so, too.”

  “Th-that’s—” Haruyuki rose up slightly and earnestly shook his head. “Kuroyukihime would never, ever—”

  “Yeah, Lotus’s the exception.” Niko smiled faintly, wryly, and touched the fingertips of her left hand to Haruyuki’s chest as if to reassure him. “I mean, she tried to hunt the whole lot of ’em, so. She’s amazing. Really something…”