Naturally, he had no regrets at having leapt into the place of his own death. But Falcon couldn’t find the words he should say in this precious time. So he clenched his teeth, suppressed a howl, and kept staring intently at Blossom’s face mask. So that he would absolutely never forget the sky color of her eyes even after he disappeared from the Accelerated World.
“…I’m sorry.” The words spilled out, her voice hoarse. “I’m sorry, Fal. I…I was spoiled by your kindness. I wanted to get back the future that was stolen from me in the real world…And because of that, I pushed you to pretend to be an adult, too. This end…my own impatience made this happen. I’m sorry…”
Particles of clear light fell from Blossom’s eye lenses one after the other and melted into the air.
You didn’t. Not at all.
He wanted to tell her this, but a hot lump blocked his throat, and he couldn’t speak. He at least shook his head hard. She caressed his helmet with her slender index finger.
“But, y’know…Believe this at least. I loved you. I’ve loved you since the moment we first met. I mean, I knew it right away. That you wanted to protect weak me. While everyone else was thinking about how to steal someone else’s points, you…you alone…”
Without giving voice to the rest of that sentence, Blossom smiled. And then she moved her hand from his cheek to clasp his hand and guide it. To the center of her own chest, gruesomely torn up by Jormungand’s teeth.
“A last request. Fal, make me disappear.”
“…What…” He finally managed to utter just that, and Blossom smiled.
“I only have seven points left,” she announced. “If I’m going to be killed by that Enemy and disappear from this world, then I want you to be the one to send me off. That way, Brain Burst might force an uninstall, but I’m sure I’ll still be able to remember you. Even if all my memories are erased, at least you, forever.”
Here, the effect time of the technique finally ended, and the green flower bud slowly began to melt away from the top. The howl of rage of the snake shattered the silence that had filled the sphere.
“…Fron.” The time they had left was much too short for him to put into words all the thoughts that filled him. Pulling the destroyed, sunlight-colored avatar tightly to him with his left arm, Falcon whispered, with all the emotion in his heart, “Thanks.”
Thanks. Thanks for taking the hand I offered. Thanks for teaching me so many things. Thanks for expanding my tiny world.
He stretched out the fingers of the hand she held. His sharply tapered fingertips, patterned after a bird of prey, touched down in the center of Saffron Blossom’s chest, immediately above the critical point of her heart.
“…I love you.”
As Falcon made this declaration, words he had never once been able to get out before, he thrust his sharp right hand downward.
His flat hand pierced deeper and deeper into the Destiny armor, rendered ineffective by Jormungand’s fangs and digestive fluids.
Good-bye, Fal. I love you, you know.
Her voice became the faintest hint of a gentle breeze, flowing through his consciousness and disappearing.
Rather than breaking into a thousand fragments and scattering explosively, Saffron Blossom’s avatar gently unraveled. Bathed in light the color of the warm spring sun, the slender silhouette split into countless ribbons and danced up into the sky. Those ribbons were reduced to even smaller threads of code, and then melted into the air before finally vanishing.
The final extinction phenomenon. The complete retreat from the Accelerated World of those who lost all their points.
When he came back to himself, his heart was empty.
Almost as if he himself had vanished, a sense of loss overcame the crouching Chrome Falcon as the countless fangs of Jormungand bit into his back with a screech.
In the Enemy’s mouth, he was raised up high. Orange sparks scattered from his silver armor. Kree, kreee. His avatar’s entire body squealed and groaned, and the health gauge in his field of view dropped before his eyes. At the same time, he was assaulted with a dizzying pain.
But he did not scream. Blossom had experienced this pain a practically infinite number of times. He gritted his teeth; he desperately endured it. In the distance in his hazy, warped vision, he could see the figures of the players standing in a circle.
In their eyes was a uniform surprise—and a hint of contempt. They were laughing scornfully at a fool who would senselessly throw his own life away.
It wasn’t actually impossible for him to escape from this situation. All he had to do was use his special-attack gauge and do his Blink once again.
But he wasn’t going to run anymore. Was there even any meaning in living?
Saffron Blossom was gone. He was alone again. Even if he did escape and live on, what would be the point in going back to his solo player life and fighting purposeless duels? If that was how it was going to be, he was better off devoured here by the snake like Blossom. Over and over and over again. Have his points run out like she did and be expelled from this world. Until that moment—
Abruptly, he noticed a small light flashing beneath the HP gauge being carved away and the special-attack gauge being filled up. The light followed precisely when he turned his head. It was a system message. The square cursor was trying to tell him something.
The instant he focused his hazy vision on that point, a row of text flowed soundlessly out from it.
YOU ACQUIRED AN ENHANCED ARMAMENT: THE DESTINY.
For a minute, he couldn’t understand what this meant.
The message was telling him he had acquired an Enhanced Armament. And it didn’t say GOT like it did for Enhanced Armament obtained in sealed card form, but ACQUIRED to indicate that he had become the owner of it. The subject was armor. The Disaster, which should have disappeared together with Saffron Blossom.
But why? The only methods of transferring an Enhanced Armament were to sell and rebuy it in the shop or hand it over in a direct duel.
Or wait. He’d heard vague rumors of one other way. When the player who owned the Enhanced Armament was eliminated from the Accelerated World, in a very small percentage of cases, the Enhanced Armament was transferred to the storage of the player who delivered the final blow.
He had no way of knowing now if Blossom had asked him to strike the final blow for her because she had been hoping for this result.
However, to Falcon, it felt like a final message from her.
Live. Live and fight.
Unconsciously, he murmured under his silver surface the default voice command to equip an Enhanced Armament.
“Equip…the Destiny.”
An intense light like a small star was born, and the world was dyed platinum.
Thick silver armor covered his limbs and torso with a sharp metallic sound. The design was very different from when Blossom had been wearing the armor. By nature, Enhanced Armament would automatically adjust in size according to the stature of the duel avatar putting it on, but the way this armor changed went far beyond the realm of adjustment. It lost its former elegance and delicacy and took on the appearance of plate armor, all sharp edges.
The last piece, covering his head, was an samurai-style helmet rather than the original crown. Enclosing more than 80 percent of Falcon’s body, the thick armor repelled with a fierce clang Jormungand’s fangs as they were about to dig into his avatar.
The enormous Legend-ranked Enemy let out a cry of fury as it tried to devour Falcon once more, while at the same time, excreting a large quantity of transparent, viscous fluid from the glands between its fangs. This dripped down onto the silver armor and tried to steal its strength with a corrosion effect.
But the gleaming, mirrored silver clouded over for an instant before changing to a blackish chrome silver, as if a thin film had been peeled off and then resisted the corrosion. The new color matched that of Falcon’s original armor perfectly.
Chrome fell basically in the middle of the metal color chart,
between precious and base metals. It had only mediocre resistance to physical and special attacks. Its lone special characteristic was that it essentially completely repelled corrosion-type attacks.
The armor, a supposedly volitionless Enhanced Armament, was resisting the monster’s mucous by absorbing the characteristics of the avatar wearing it—that was the only explanation for this phenomenon. Although Falcon couldn’t have cared less about suppositions of this sort on the logical side of things.
As if guided by something, he raised both hands and seized the enormous fangs trying to pierce his chest, sending sparks flying everywhere.
Fwoosh! In the depths of his heart, something began to burn.
It was a feeling he had never had in the eleven months since landing in the Accelerated World, a subjective time of more than five years. Molded by and born from his deep affection for Saffron Blossom and his despair at her death: rage.
“Unh…Unnaaaah…” A husky groan spilled out from deep in his throat.
In the real world, too, Chrome Falcon was a child who did not get angry. He did what grown-ups told him to, he was careful to watch the faces of those around him, he lived with his own self on the back burner.
So when the class started bullying his best friend from kindergarten the instant they started at the same elementary school, he did nothing; he simply distanced himself from the other boy. He shut his eyes, plugged his ears, and waited for someone else to do something. But before that someone could appear, the boy who had been his good friend was gone.
He really should have gotten angry at least. At the children who instigated the bullying. At the teacher who was oblivious to it. At himself pretending not to have seen anything. But, unable to do even that, he pushed and shoved until all his memories and feelings were the size of a pebble and then buried that in a deep place.
“Unh…ah…aaaaaah…” Falcon’s cry continued, his voice warped. He felt like now the pebble had fine cracks in it, and something incandescent was gushing out.
All ten of his fingers transformed into massive talons with a chang. The sharp tips creaked as they dug into Jormungand’s fangs. The edges of the armor from his arms to his shoulders became even more tapered and increased in volume.
Now he understood why the thirty people who had sent the fake Legion entry message had betrayed him and Blossom and set this trap. Wasn’t it because they wanted to get this Enhanced Armament, maybe thinking they could cheat with it?
Saffron Blossom’s not like us. She had the strength to protect her ideals and make them a reality.
“But…you…”
All of you, you’re BB players; you had to have been treated more or less like aliens in the real world. You had to have been shunned by some group and come to this Accelerated World with that hurt carved into your soul. And yet you still shun someone else? You make a circle around someone different from you and throw rocks at them?
“For people like you…Fron was…trying to make…a place to belong…” As he squeezed this rage out from his depths, his avatar’s hands took on a weak light. Not energy to illuminate anything. A negative fluctuation to steal heat, light.
An aura of darkness.
This kind of continuous effect was supposed to cloak a duel avatar only when it was using its gauge and activating its special attack. And yet Falcon’s special-attack gauge stayed at essentially full charge; it didn’t drop a single pixel.
But he continued to spit out his strangled speech, unaware of this abnormality.
“Fron was…just trying…to make this world a place…where you could always…play, where you didn’t have to…be scared of losing all your points…that’s all…”
Before he even knew it, Falcon had buried his ten talons deep into Jormungand’s fangs and pulled them completely free of his body. The monster blinked two rows of eyes and twisted itself up and writhed violently, but the avatar’s arms didn’t budge beneath their aura of darkness.
“That’s all…she wanted!!”
A roar like vomiting blood.
Deep in his mind, Falcon heard the sound of the pebble of frozen feelings being smashed to bits.
Rage. Any- and everything he had suppressed all this time—from before he could remember until this very moment today—exploded and ran wild within his avatar before becoming a shadowy aura and being released to the outside world.
Pulsations of darkness shook and cracked the snake’s thick skin, as though they were an actual physical phenomenon, splitting the top edge of the Enemy’s round mouth as it screeched.
“Ah…aaah…aaaaaaaaaaah!!” The yell was distorted, metallic, as Falcon thrust the arms clutching the fangs out to both sides.
Jormungand’s head was ripped in half with a curious sound. The majority of its eyes ruptured from the inside, and massive quantities of fluid jetted out of the deep fissure. Ignoring this, he plunged his hands into the crack, grabbed on to the soft matter inside, and pulled the monster even farther apart. Split it.
When his feet hit the ground, the hell snake was in two parts down to its midsection. As the right half writhed and tried to disappear into its nest, he caught it in the talons of both hands and similarly held the left side fast with the pointed ends of his feet. Mustering up every ounce of power in his body, he ripped the beast in half in one pull, right down to its tail.
The body of the Enemy, finally completely divided, stopped in an unnatural shape for a moment before turning into thousands of fragments and scattering.
From the center of an explosion effect so grand it blanketed the entire basin, something long and slender materialized and stood before Falcon. A long sword with a cool, clear crystal-white blade. An Enemy drop Enhanced Armament. Without hesitating, he reached out and grabbed onto the hilt, which glittered like it held a star within it.
Instantly, the longsword became a small card and disappeared. In the top of his field of view was a small system message: YOU ACQUIRED AN ENHANCED ARMAMENT: STAR CASTER.
“Equip Star Caster,” he muttered in a creaking voice.
The divine design of the longsword reappeared in his right hand. However, the dark aura immediately blanketed the sword, distorting the color and the shape. The transparent crystal became a dazzling chrome silver. The straight lines of the hilt twisted ominously. The blade itself doubled in width and thickness, fangs popping up in several places.
He gripped the large sword in its new form with both hands and held it in front of his body. The blackish-silver blade reflected a single duel avatar. It was no longer the simple, slender Chrome Falcon and his round helmet. The silhouette was the epitome of brutal, the will to destroy itself made into an object.
Only his original smooth mask was exposed beneath the open helm. But the aura of darkness cohered on the forehead of the helmet, creating a visor large enough to cover his entire face. Once he lowered it, he would never be able to go back to what he had been. He knew this instinctively.
If I changed, Fron’d definitely be sad.
But she’s not in this world anymore.
Taking this as his last moment, he abandoned the name Chrome Falcon. He buried it in this ground with Saffron Blossom. Her ideals, her kindness, her compassion, he would bury it all here.
Because the ones who had rejected those ideals were the players standing stock-still around the basin. Rather than harmony, they chose war. Instead of joining hands, they preferred to steal life from one another. More than love, they desired anger and hatred. In which case…
He would give it to them.
Brandishing the sword high with both hands, indignation and rage still jetting up from the depths of his body, he howled once more.
“Ngah…Aaaaaah…!!”
The aura of darkness gushing from all parts of his body gave rise to jet-black lightning, striking the metallic earth one bolt after another. Cracks raced out in circles from beneath his feet; the ground rippled and shook. He screamed again, almost in resonance with the cries of the earth.
“Rrr
aa…aaaaaaah!!”
He felt the bottomless rage welling up inside him become a kind of medium and interfere with the system itself. As proof that this was no mere hallucination, even the font in the system colors still displayed in the top of his vision flickered repeatedly. The two lines of text, THE DESTINY and STAR CASTER, twisted, crumbled, and melted into each other. They became one line to form a new word.
THE DISASTER.
“Grrr…raaaaaaah!!”
The scream was already not that of a person. It was the howl of a starved, enraged beast.
Kasshk. The visor on his forehead came down by itself with a violent sound.
A light-gray filter covered his field of view. However, the resolution doubled, and he could clearly make out the expressions on the faces of the duel avatars in a circle around him. They were blurred with confusion and surprise and unease. But what they were feeling, what they were thinking, no longer held any meaning for Falcon. They were nothing more than targets for the slaughter. He narrowed his eyes beneath his visor and sought out the body he should hunt first.
When he turned his attention to any particular spot in the circle, the murmured conversation of the several avatars standing there was amplified and delivered to his sense of hearing as if a high-powered directional microphone had been turned on them.
“…ge full recovery confirmed. No depletion of special-attack gauge. No doubt about it, it’s Main Visualizer overwrite through Imagination circuit.”
The voice belonged to a tiny avatar with four excessively large, shining eye lenses. Responding to it was the layered black avatar that had restrained Falcon and Blossom with its strange technique.
“It seems that an explosion of sentiment through deepening of concentration can indeed bring about the phenomenon overwhelmingly fast. Although whether it can be controlled or not is a different issue.”
The four-eyed avatar nodded. “True, true. And it’s basically for sure that peeps with a mental-scar shell strength that goes beyond a certain level turn into metal colors. But whether that fusion’s a power inherent to the Seven Stars or just ’cause he’s a metal color, I can’t tell with my Analyze.”
Armor of Catastrophe Page 5