Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge

by Reki Kawahara

  “Y-you don’t have to apologize,” Haruyuki said hurriedly. “You had a lot to do getting ready for your class’s thing, right?”

  “Yeah, but Hoo gets hungry every day, y’know? Just ’cos I gotta do the festival thing doesn’t mean it’s okay to skip out. I’ve been popping in to see Hoo’s face anyway on my way home, but like, I just feel super-bad, you know?”

  UI> PUTTING THAT KIND OF HEART IN IT, YOU’RE A WONDERFUL ANIMAL CARE COMMITTEE MEMBER, IZEKI.

  This text was displayed in the bottom of their fields of view, so they turned around to find Utai smiling, both hands raised.

  “Super Prez, you’re here, too! I’m def gonna take care of Hoo next week—” She was about to apologize once more when she snapped her mouth shut. She sent her gaze on a small tour, and then looked at Haruyuki with an indescribable expression. “Preeeez, all your guests are girls from other schools? Like, seriously, what’s up?”

  “N-nothing’s up! Uh, um, so then, let’s give it our all with the Animal Care Club next week.” Babbling, Haruyuki plotted out an emergency escape.

  But Reina smirked for some reason and cut him off. “You came all this way and all, how about stopping in at our café?”

  “N-no, uh, we just had crepes, so…” It was when he started to say this, feeling that he should politely decline, that Haruyuki realized it: Class B’s project was supposedly a cosplay café, but Reina was only wearing an apron that said “Café Animal Kingdom” over her Umesato uniform, which didn’t seem very much in the way of costumery at all.

  “You’re curious, yeah?” Reina grinned broadly, perhaps reading this thought on his face. She indicated the entrance to the classroom with her left hand. Pushed this far, he couldn’t walk away, and his interest was indeed piqued as to how exactly it was cosplay. He looked back ever so timidly.

  “I figured it’d end up like this,” Niko said, her whole body radiating exasperation. “So then, should we go?”

  “’Kay.” The reason Pard immediately agreed was that she was curious about class B’s café, given that she worked every day in a maid costume. Or maybe not; it wasn’t clear.

  The instant they slipped through the entrance—pushed onward by Reina’s “Table for seven!”—Haruyuki blinked his eyes several times. The other waitresses also wore aprons over their uniforms, and the neatly decorated classroom did have a fairly real café atmosphere to it. And unlike class C and its reliance entirely on AR displays, the brick walls and wooden window frames were printouts on synthetic paper pasted up, which must have taken a fair bit of time. The four tables—student desks pushed together—also had tablecloths neatly laid over them. The reason the café was named Animal Kingdom was apparently the stuffed animals of various sizes decorating the room.

  Shown to a table big enough for eight, Haruyuki turned to Reina and inadvertently offered an ill-advised comment. “The decorations are amazing, but you couldn’t use AR textures for this?”

  “We thought that, too, right? But we basically used up all our class resources, you know?”

  “Huh? A-are you using AR somewhere?” He whirled his head around, looking at the shop, but he couldn’t spot anything that looked like it. If he had to describe his surroundings, he’d say it felt like the back of the class was raised like a stage, and the student customers there were striking poses in groups of four and taking pictures, but the background was just the brick wall, and they were wearing Umesato uniforms. Reina and all the other waitresses were also in uniforms with aprons.

  But Fuko, also looking at the stage, nodded as if it had all come together for her. “Oh, I see. Is that it, then? That’s why it’s a cosplay café. That’s quite the interesting idea, hmm?”

  “So, that’s like, you can take as many pics as you want with one drink! Um, hmm, so what, what will you have?”

  This conversation was incomprehensible to Haruyuki, but unable to question Reina further now that she was in full waitress mode, he looked down at the menu on the table. He had no sooner thought that it would be full of nothing but ready-made soft drinks when he froze at the names alongside them. “Kitty Prank,” “Lunchtime Lion.” According to the names, they were original nonalcoholic drinks made from fresh juice and flavored syrups.

  After a bit of a commotion about this and that, they completed their order—Haruyuki forced to get the Dusk Crow, Pard voluntarily choosing the Leopard in the Tree—and after a few minutes, their drinks arrived from the kitchen set up in one corner of the classroom.

  Just when they were chattering and finishing their drinks of various colors—the Dusk Crow was pretty good: black tapioca pearls floating in mango juice—the photo stage emptied out, so urged on by Reina, they stood up from their seats.

  Apparently, the six girls had all figured out the mystery of the cosplay café already, and they walked with certain steps, but Haruyuki was still unsure. Although he stuck with everyone else and moved to the stage at the end of the line, he cocked his head from side to side, and his shirt was yanked on hard from behind. When he turned around, Reina’s voice was quiet in his ear.

  “Prez-wise, might be more fun to take pics than to have your pic taken, yeah?”

  “Huh? Oh…um, yeah.” It was true that rather than get up onstage alongside six girls, it suited him much more to figure out the composition as the photographer. They could take a group photo later, once they met up with Kuroyukihime, Chiyuri, and Takumu. Haruyuki nodded and turned to Fuko and the others. “Okay, so I’ll take the pictures! Get a little closer to each other in the middle. Kusakabe, a little to the right. Okay, that’s good!”

  He launched his field of view screenshot app, and in the moment when he was ready to shoot, a window appeared in the center of his virtual desktop with the words IT’S MAGIC TIME! At the bottom was a YES/NO button asking for permission to add an AR display. He furrowed his brow, wondering what the magic could have been, but it seemed that the six onstage had expected this development, and they all moved their fingers as one.

  Given that, Haruyuki also raised his right hand and pushed the YES button.

  Pwaaan! With a loud noise, the stage was blanketed in rainbow-colored smoke. Naturally, it wasn’t real, but reflexively, he threw his head back. After a few seconds, the smoke disappeared, and the familiar faces of the lady Burst Linkers emerged from it once more. But.

  “Whaa—?!” Haruyuki threw his head back once more with a shout. Because the appearance of all six had changed completely, except for their faces, hair, and physiques. Instead of the street clothes they had been wearing, their bodies were wrapped in fur and feathers, and they had large ears on their heads and tails sprouting from their backsides. To express it one phrase, it was as though they had transformed with “animal magic.”

  “…Oh, ohhh, so this is the magic time, then.” Finally understanding just half of the situation, Haruyuki focused on the six people on stage once more. They had all transformed into different animals. From the left, Rin was a gray fawn, Fuko a blue sea eagle, Utai a white ermine, Niko a pink rabbit, Akira a light-brown beaver, and Pard a yellow leopard with black spots.

  Staring blankly at the troop of girls happily assessing one another’s transformations, Haruyuki was visited by yet another abrupt realization, and he cried out once more. “Oh! Did you all maybe turn into the animals of the drinks we had before?”

  “That’s exactly it. But I mean, that was written pretty clearly on the menu,” Reina commented, rolling her eyes, and added as though the thought had just struck her, “Prez, you’re like that, yeah? One of those people who doesn’t read the manual when you DL the game.”

  “Th-that’s totally me,” he replied with an embarrassed smile, and was reassured in his heart. The animal magic apparently happened only onstage, so photographer Haruyuki was still in his uniform, but if he had drunk a hippo something or an elephant whatever and gotten up onstage with everyone, right about now he would have been looking pretty pathetic. “But this is a seriously amazing AR program, huh? I mean, I think i
t’s pretty tough to perfectly match up a texture on a moving body without using markers.”

  Getting over his surprise at the transformation, Haruyuki was now curious about the technology. It was a fair bit more difficult to do this than turn the walls and windows into the moving images he had revealed in the class C exhibit.

  “I don’t really get the tough stuff either, but my brother’s a buyer for this pretty big shop, right?” Reina said, half-bragging and half-embarrassed. “So he borrowed this test program they developed. And the stuffed animal data along with it.”

  “R-right…” The word before “shop” that Reina had omitted was probably not “video game” or “computer,” but something along the lines of fashion. Haruyuki guessed this much and bobbed his head up and down.

  “Heeey, Prez. I don’t mean to interrupt your little chat, but maybe you could get around to taking the picture already?”

  At Niko’s voice, Haruyuki hurriedly returned his gaze to the stage. “Oh! S-sorry! I’ll take it right now. So just stay like that, and I’ll take three pics in a row!” he called back. Haruyuki promptly pressed the shutter button on his camera app. A large countdown from three was displayed in his field of view, and when it hit zero, they heard a fake shutter sound.

  Although it was a screenshot of his field of view, the Neurolinker in its current form didn’t have an eyeball sensor—it couldn’t record what your naked eye was seeing as is, but rather recorded the scene with small lenses built into the front and back of the Linker. Thus, during successive shots, the cameraperson had to remain as still as possible.

  But when he had taken the first shot, he realized something and very nearly dropped his head. Hurrying to fix his neck in place again, he moved just his eyes to confirm it. In the window of the dress-up AR program displayed at the bottom of his virtual desktop, there appeared to be a button to deploy the options menu. He touched on it casually, and a selection menu appeared.

  Most of the choices had names like MILANO COLLECTION SPRING/SUMMER 2047 or LONDON COLLECTION FALL/WINTER 2047, and the whole thing did have the air of the fashion world about it, which was incomprehensible to Haruyuki. Scrolling down to the very bottom of the list, he found at item called ANIMAL FUR SUITS with a check mark next to it to indicate the current selection. He understood that it probably meant “stuffed animals,” so he gave a mental nod of satisfaction before noticing that there was one other item at the bottom of the list. The name was ANIMAL FUR SUITS S.

  …Super? Special? Strong? he wondered, furrowing his brow, but this alone was impossible to hazard a guess at. The camera finished taking the three pictures at that point, so he decided to give this one a go, too, and lifted his finger to touch the item that was maybe strong stuffed animals. A confirmation window popped up, asking if he wanted to switch directly from the current outfit data, so he moved to press the YES button.

  “Ah! Prez! Don’t!” Reina shouted at the same time as he pushed the button.

  A second later, a magnificent scream came from the stage—actually, the only one who screamed a scream-like scream was Niko.

  When Haruyuki lifted his face, he discovered that over 80 percent of the fur and feathers of the animal costumes had vanished, and in their place, a bare skin texture had been pasted over the figures of the six girls. This was nothing other than “animal-ish swimsuits” or maybe “beautiful girls in beast-person mode in a video game.”

  “C-c’mon! Put it back!! I’ll knock your teeth out!!” Niko shrieked with a furious look on her face.

  “This. Is a little. Embarrassing.” Rin’s eyes filled with tears.

  Akira and Pard stared at him silently with icy glares.

  “…” “…”

  “Oh my goodness! I’ll have to give you a teeeensy punishment later, hmm?” Fuko commented with a smile, while Utai hid behind her, her face beet-red.

  Seeing this situation on the stage, Haruyuki went into full panic mode. Wheezing, he tried to put the outfit data set back to what it was. But he was so flustered that he ended up waving both hands around, and his left hand hit a different window on his desktop before his right hand could get there.

  After a count of 3, 2, 1 was displayed in his vision, the snap of the shutter rang out.

  It was only once everything was all over that Reina informed him that the S in ANIMAL FUR SUITS S stood for Sexy.

  Once the process of full-power apology and forcible photo deletion had been completed, it was exactly eleven o’clock.

  They hurried back to the cafeteria to meet up with Chiyuri, who had removed her apron but was still wearing the rabbit ears. Thinking that he should be glad, very glad, that she and Kuroyukihime hadn’t been at the Animal Kingdom, Haruyuki led the group, now eight people large, toward the kendo dojo.

  On a sign hanging at the entrance, the words SAMURAI X DANCE twirled and pranced around, fanning anticipation and concern, but when they went inside, the standing-room-only seats were basically full. They somehow managed to carve out space for the eight of them and waited for the start of the performance in five minutes.

  During that time, Haruyuki glanced any number of times at Rin’s face in profile next to him. Although she had seemed like she was having fun when they were at the cosplay café, she did actually seem to be talking less than usual. But the windows were all covered with blackout curtains, and the lighting was lowered, so it was dim inside the dojo, and he couldn’t tell if she looked pale or not.

  “…Um, Kusakabe. If you’re still not feeling good, just say so and I can take you to the nurse’s office…,” he murmured on impulse.

  Rin turned her face toward him and smiled. “Thank you. But. I’m okay.”

  “You are?” Haruyuki replied, but then felt the slightest sense that something was off with Rin’s figure as she stood there.

  Huh? He blinked hard, but at that moment, the lights in the dojo were turned off completely. He could hear the low, heavy sound of drums coming from somewhere. The volume gradually increased, hit a climax, and then stopped abruptly.

  An intense spotlight cut through the silence. At some point, the dozen or so members of the boys’ kendo team, wearing kimonos, had lined up in bold poses with their arms crossed in front of their chests in the center of the dojo. And the traditional clothes were not the team kendo uniforms—they were the warrior-style navy hakama pants under the light-blue kamishimo sleeveless jacket from the Edo era. They hadn’t gone quite so far as to shave their heads save for a chonmage topknot, but they did all have the traditional white hachimaki sweatbands tied around their foreheads.

  Standing in the center position of the front row was none other than Takumu. For today only, he had taken off his glasses and pushed his hair back, so there wasn’t a speck of the usual professorial air about him. A shrill voice called “Mayuzumiiii!” and Haruyuki unconsciously peered at Chiyuri to his left, but she was apparently too worried about whether the performance would go well to be calling out to Takumu.

  Silence fell once more, and Takumu slowly uncrossed his arms and brought his right hand to his left hip. Hanging there was neither a bamboo sword nor a wooden sword. He grabbed the hilt stretching out from a black sheath and yanked it out with a shannk to make a dazzling silver light dance through the air.

  Naturally, it was not actually metal, but an imitation sword made of plastic with metallic paint. But the way Takumu moved gave it a sense of weight, so it looked like nothing other than the real thing. Clutching the sword in both hands, he slowly raised it up high above his head.

  Then he froze, and just as the nervous excitement in the room was about to snap, Takumu brought his sword down sharply, in time with the booming of a large drum. After a pause, the other members of the team also unsheathed their swords, brandished them, and sliced through the air in perfect unison.

  The group dance that followed was, in a word, stunning. Riding the beat of the large drum, the samurai stepped forward with a battle cry, waved their swords, jumped, and turned. At times, they were in perfect
unison; at others, they staggered slightly as they danced their hearts out.

  At some point, the music turned into Japanese-style rock with a good beat, and people in the audience started clapping along. Haruyuki clapped his hands together along with them as he stared at Takumu moving around and scattering drops of sweat. He had probably gotten the center position because of his height and good looks, but it might also have been because the rumors were true and he would be the next team captain once the summer tournament was over.

  Behind Takumu to the left, a small-statured samurai danced with a very serious look on his face. Never taking his eyes off Takumu, the boy seemed to be following his movements very intently. Seiji Nomi, formerly the Twilight Marauder, Dusk Taker. He had been defeated in a sudden-death match in the Unlimited Neutral Field and lost both the Brain Burst program and his memory of the Accelerated World—he was no longer a Burst Linker.

  The urge to plunder that had almost violently haunted him had disappeared, and now, as a serious, junior member of the kendo team, he apparently adored Takumu. The overwhelming strength he’d had back when he was using the Physical Burst command was gone now, but he had absolutely had talent to begin with. For instance, even here, the sharpness and certainty of each of his dance moves was better than most of the other team members’. And more than anything else, there wasn’t a hint of hatred or anything twisted on his still-cherubic face. For Nomi, Brain Burst had definitely been something like a curse.

  No, I’m sure that’s just what I want to think, Haruyuki thought in a corner of his brain as he clapped hard in time with the music that was growing ever more frenzied as it approached the climax.

  Brain Burst was both a salvation and a curse for all Burst Linkers. It could even be said that this dual nature was the true essence of the Accelerated World. Good and evil existed in that place in equal measure. If Haruyuki had been guided by malice, he probably would have ended up as a Burst Linker possessed by hatred, the way Nomi had been. On the other hand, by pushing Dusk Taker to total point loss, Haruyuki had stolen the good that Nomi found and that he might have been able to find in the future in that world.