Armor of Catastrophe

by Reki Kawahara

  In Cyan Plate, the Incarnate attack of Takumu’s avatar, Cyan Pile, he caught with his left hand the iron spike that shot out of the Enhanced Armament Pile Driver equipped in his right hand and pulled it out, transforming it into a longsword. Rather than simple repetitive training, he had to confront painful memories in order to catch the spike, a symbol of his own mental trauma.

  “Yeah. I trained until I nearly passed out before I learned how to pierce the wall of the old Tokyo Tower. I was just totally focused on speed, speed, speed.”

  Their eyes grew distant. For a variety of reasons, the head of the Legion Prominence—the Red King, Scarlet Rain—had been the one to initiate Takumu into the Incarnate System, but her Spartan style was basically on par with Haruyuki’s Incarnate instructor, Sky Raker. Yet they had suffered through it and somehow managed to learn a basic Incarnate technique: Haruyuki, range expansion; Takumu, power expansion.

  “But just by equipping this ISS kit, you’re able to use both the power expansion technique Dark Blow and the range expansion technique Dark Shot. Is that it?” Takumu said hoarsely, and dropped his gaze to his own left hand, a smile with a color Haruyuki couldn’t remember seeing too much bleeding onto the corners of his mouth. “It doesn’t matter how hard you try—if something’s out of reach, you’ll never be able to grab on to it. That’s the basic principle of Brain Burst. That’s what I’ve always thought. Your duel avatar is almost cruel in how it unequivocally teaches you the limits of your own physical self. Which is exactly why this game gains another reality, right?”

  “Taku?” Haruyuki cocked his head to one side, slightly bewildered by this small outburst.

  Takumu lifted his face with a gasp. All that was on his lips now was his usual faint intellectual smile. “Oh, sorry. Don’t worry about it. You’re right. If someone’s distributing Enhanced Armament like that, this situation is pretty serious. The balance between duel and Territories will crumble.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Haruyuki nodded and brushed aside an irrational sense that something was out of place. “Although it’s bad enough that Incarnate techniques are being used in normal duels, that power is just too great. To be honest, beginner Incarnate users like us can’t fight that. Like, in the Meeting of the Seven Kings the day before yesterday, some people thought that depending on the situation, the existence of the Incarnate System should be disclosed to all Burst Linkers, but…if the ISS kits are on the market everywhere, is there any point in training now from the first steps in Incarnate techniques? It’s almost like…”

  “Someone’s beat them to the punch?” Takumu hit the nail on the head while Haruyuki was searching for the words. He pushed up his glasses, an even more complicated look on his face. “But, Haru, if that’s the case, that means that the guys who showed off the power of the Incarnate System to all those people in the Gallery at the Hermes’ Cord race last week are the masterminds behind disseminating the ISS kits now.”

  “Ah!” Not having even considered the possibility up to that point, Haruyuki threw himself back so hard that his chair clattered. Both eyes open wide, he murmured the name of the organization Takumu was hinting at. “The Acceleration Research Society?”

  “Let’s think about it from the beginning. The first time they showed themselves was in April of this year. Dusk Taker skillfully made use of an illegal brain implant chip to attack the Umesato Junior High local net, while Rust Jigsaw did the same at Akihabara battleground. Maybe there were other closed nets they ran wild in using the same methods.”

  Haruyuki remembered Twilight Marauder’s menacing power, so great that it had forced Haruyuki and his friends to surrender, however temporarily, and shuddered all over, nodding. But recollecting the whole incident now, a question he hadn’t noticed at the time popped into his head.

  “But, Taku, when I think about it, it’s weird. At the time, in April, neither of them actively went to use Incarnate techniques themselves. Dusk Taker only started using that purple fluctuation when you pushed him into a corner in a duel. And I feel like Rust Jigsaw actually didn’t end up using it at all. But for those guys, it wouldn’t have been weird at all if they attacked with Incarnate at full throttle right from the start.”

  “We should think of it like they were limited. But I don’t think the reason is that abuse of Incarnate risks calling the dark side, like the Red King and Raker warned us.”

  Haruyuki nodded deeply at Takumu’s words.

  In the power that the Incarnate System revealed, there were four quadrants, like the xy plane in mathematics. The x-axis was the breadth of the imagination—in other words, moving toward the individual or toward the world—while the y-axis was the lightness of the imagination—whether it took hope as its source or despair. The first quadrant, in the upper right, was positive will with range as its target; the second quadrant, to the upper left, was positive will with the individual as its target; the third, to the bottom left, was negative will with the individual as its target; and the fourth, to the bottom right, was negative will with range as its target.

  Attack-type Incarnate techniques like Haruyuki’s Laser Sword, Takumu’s Cyan Blade, and Kuroyukihime’s incomparably more powerful Vorpal Strike were categorized in the second quadrant because they used as their source the hope inside themselves. The universal wellspring of Incarnate was mental scars, but whether they would pump hope from that deep hole or fall into the darkness of despair was left to the choice of the person themselves.

  And although they were rare, there were some Burst Linkers who had mastered Incarnate of the first quadrant. Fuko’s Wind Veil, which protected herself and companions around her, was the most conspicuous example. Haruyuki didn’t know its name, but Utai’s Incarnate technique, which burned a wide range with crimson flames, was probably also in the first quadrant because Bush Utan, burned up by those flames, hadn’t felt the slightest suffering. Those were flames of purification to exorcise pain.

  However, it wasn’t the case that all Incarnates showed this kind of positive power. For instance, Dusk Taker’s “purple fluctuation,” which had no fixed name. That technique shaved off whatever it touched and swallowed the object up into nothingness; it was a third-quadrant, dark-side attack power that used internal despair for energy. And Rust Jigsaw’s Rust Order. That power to summon a storm of red rust a hundred meters in diameter to corrode and destroy all things within its range had to be a power of the fourth quadrant. The imagination of the end, born from a despair against the world.

  In short, these two from the Acceleration Research Society had probably learned negative Incarnate right from the start. At this late stage, there would be no reason why their teacher would caution them about falling into the dark side.

  “So then that means they had a specific reason for limiting their Incarnate, I guess,” Haruyuki muttered.

  Takumu nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess so. But last week, when he stormed into the Hermes’ Cord race, basically the moment Rust Jigsaw appeared, he was using Incarnate. Except that wasn’t on the level of just using it. Dragging not just the other teams, but however many hundreds were in the Gallery into it, that was to make us feel in our bones just how tremendous Incarnate attacks can be. And that guy calling himself the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, Black Vise, he was even there. So I think we have to assume that large-scale attack was exactly what that organization wanted.”

  “B-but if that’s true, isn’t that like a huge policy flip in just two months? In April, they were trying to lie low, but June rolls around and they’re showing off?” Haruyuki said, waving both hands around on the table.

  Takumu paused for a moment before responding quietly, “It means that in those two months, they finished their preparations.”

  “P-preparations? For what?”

  “Preparations to distribute the ISS kits.”

  “Hng!!” Once again, Haruyuki made his chair clatter against the floor.

  The two of them looked at each other wordlessly for several sec
onds. Takumu’s cheeks had lost their color and were paler than usual, and Haruyuki was pretty sure his own face was even whiter than that.

  Eventually, after drinking the last sip of his cold coffee, Takumu moved his lips. “If that assumption is true, then all I can say is they’re meticulous. It’s like they’re always one step ahead, planning their next move. They make a show of the absurd power of the Incarnate System to many members of the Gallery with a large-scale attack at Hermes’ Cord, and then immediately after that, they start distributing the ISS kits as a device to easily learn Incarnate. Honestly, after that display, even veteran Burst Linkers, who should hesitate at wearing that sort of dodgy Enhanced Armament, would give in to their impatience and reach out for it.”

  In the back of Haruyuki’s mind, Bush Utan’s cracked voice from the previous day came back to life.

  IS mode has that kind of incredible power. The ultimate power, skipping over all the rules of Brain Burst even. And there’s some jerks who knew about it and kept it quiet all this time.

  There hadn’t been only fear and impatience in Utan’s monologue; it had also contained a strong animosity toward the people who had kept the existence of the Incarnate System hidden until then—and that naturally included Haruyuki. That kind of emotional energy alone was plenty motivation to accept the black eyeball and its eerie appearance.

  “So then, Taku, is their ultimate goal to spread the ISS kit throughout the Accelerated World? Or…?” Haruyuki timidly asked his best friend, pursing his lips.

  “Is there another ‘next move’?” Takumu stared at his empty coffee cup and nodded slightly. “We don’t have enough information to determine that. I haven’t even seen this ISS kit with my own eyes.” Before Haruyuki could say anything, Takumu glanced at the clock display in the bottom right of his field of view and stood up. “Haru, isn’t your mom going to be home soon? Let’s leave it here for today.”

  “Yeah.”

  Now that Takumu mentioned it, it was almost ten already, in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Haruyuki’s mother worked at a foreign investment bank and in exchange for a late start to her workday, she also came home late, but even so, at this hour, she could basically come home any second. And although his mother wasn’t the type to get angry at Takumu being here at this time of day, they couldn’t exactly continue openly chatting about Brain Burst.

  “Hey, Taku?” Haruyuki asked one final question in a small voice as he followed Takumu out of the living room. “This—we should probably talk to Kuroyukihime and the others about it…right?”

  “…Well, of course.” On Takumu’s face as he replied, waving a hand in the entryway, was the same intellectual expression as always.

  So Haruyuki forgot about the slightly long silence that preceded that reply and bobbed his head up and down. “Right? Okay. I’ll talk to Kuroyukihime tomorrow. Fortunately, it’s Thursday when we’re diving back into the Castle so we don’t have to do a bunch of stuff tomorrow.”

  Once again, Takumu was silent, narrowing his eyes as though something had dazzled them. When Haruyuki raised an eyebrow, he laughed it off. “It’s just the way you’re all casual, ‘diving into the Castle.’ I was just thinking you jump in with both feet like always.”

  “N-no, I mean, it’s not such a big—”

  “Ha-ha-ha! It wasn’t a compliment.” Takumu reached out with his right hand and jabbed Haruyuki’s shoulder lightly before slipping his shoes on. Looking serious once more, he added, “I’ll try some tricks of my own to get information on the ISS kit thing.”

  “Y-yeah. Good idea. But don’t do anything too reckless,” Haruyuki said, finding it a little weird himself that he would say something like that. For many years, doing reckless things had been Haruyuki’s job, and Takumu’s role had been to stop him.

  Perhaps feeling the same way, Takumu grinned again and nodded. “Yeah, I know. Okay, see you at school tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, see you tomorrow.” Haruyuki raised his hand lightly, and his best friend opened the door and slid out into the dim hallway.

  Listening to the sound of the automatic lock as the door shut once more, Haruyuki was aware of that sensation returning to his chest. That he didn’t want to talk about it. That he shouldn’t have talked about it.

  A delusion. It was good that he talked about it. After all, it was precisely because he and Takumu discussed it that he realized the possibility that the source of the ISS kits was the Acceleration Research Society. And when he told Kuroyukihime about the situation the next day after school, she was sure to show him the right way to proceed, just like she always did.

  Clenching his hands tightly, he forced his own thoughts to this conclusion before tracing his steps back through the living room into the kitchen to wash the coffee mugs.

  6

  The next day was Wednesday, June 19.

  He opened the door to his mother’s bedroom a crack to tell her he was leaving for the day, and to his Neurolinker came a five-hundred-yen lunch allowance. Afterward, he took the elevator to the ground floor and stepped out onto the sidewalk of the ring road, Kannana Street.

  In social studies class the other day, he had gotten the chance to watch a video from a long, long time ago, recorded on the streets of Suginami where Haruyuki and his friends lived. It had been taken at the beginning of the century, around the year 2010, with a video camera, so it wasn’t a 3-D video you could do a full dive in, but rather a flat image. However, the images of the town in such disarray had made a serious impression on the students. It was different from the electrical chaos of the current Akihabara, half of which was really just for show. This was everyday life laid bare, steeped in years of history and the work of its citizens. Even along Kannana, supposedly the main thoroughfare in the city, small individual-owned shops and even regular homes could be seen everywhere.

  Of course, if you went down a little into one of the back streets, there were any number of stand-alone homes and old apartment buildings even now. But the main thoroughfares of Kannana and Oume had been nearly doubled forty years earlier, and only strings of large-scale commercial institutions, housing complexes, or tidy green spaces lined them now. At and around Koenji Station as well, the unorganized bustle of the past was gone; the area had been completely transformed into a multistoried combination building linking the facilities around the pedestrian deck.

  And there was one more thing. Haruyuki noticed an inconspicuous change that nonetheless held major significance. Something he couldn’t go a day without seeing, everywhere, inside and out. No one paid them any mind precisely because there were so many. Black half or full spheres, about five centimeters in diameter. In the old video, there wasn’t a single one of these so-called social cameras anywhere.

  In class, they also learned that this entirely automatic monitoring camera net began to be set up in the mid-2030s. After that, occurrence of crime in public spaces dropped dramatically. Considering the formidable performance of the cameras, this was only natural. After all, when the system caught any illegal activity within its field of view, it automatically identified and tracked it, while reporting it to the local police at the same time. Naturally, this was not to say that every little crime without exception ended up in arrest and indictment, but, for instance, if you tossed a cigarette butt or an empty juice container on the ground within view of a camera, a warning mail would arrive from the authorities the next day, and a fine would be automatically withdrawn from your bank account at the end of the month.

  Exactly where this extremely advanced and complicated image processing was carried out and by what system was a state secret of the highest order, and not a single detail was disclosed to the citizens of the country. The sole fact made public was the name “Social Security Surveillance Center,” or the SSSC for short. Even the Kuroyukihime said she could only guess at where the center was. Obviously, Haruyuki couldn’t even do that.

  Immediately before the raised platform of the Chuo Line, he turned right off of Kannana and arrived a
t the road to school, bathed in the ceaseless roar of cars racing along. As he walked, he started wondering and whirled his head around; he knew the social cameras were looking down with a bird’s-eye view from everywhere: power poles and street lamps, traffic signs, signals, all of it. To be honest, he could see how it would be creepy, but for Haruyuki, the system held a significance greater than maintaining public order.

  It went without saying that this significance was Brain Burst. The BB program easily infiltrated the social camera net, supposedly guarded by top-level walls, and generated 3-D fields from those super-high-precision images to produce a reality that rivaled that of the real world. The fact that Burst Linkers were able to gain another self in their duel avatars and another reality in the Accelerated World was first and foremost because of the overwhelming amount of information in the duel field.

  However, this system, utopia though it may have been for gamers, had just one negative side.

  In seventh grade, Haruyuki had been subjected to horrible bullying by three students in his class. On an almost daily basis, they’d forced him to buy them bread and juice with the five hundred yen he got for lunch and bring it up to the corner of the roof where they hung out. If he refused—and even when the bread they had specified was sold out and he couldn’t buy it—they had punched and kicked him mercilessly, and forced him to grovel on his hands and knees, scraping his face against the concrete of the roof.

  Those three had been able to continue with this sort of behavior, clearly against the rules of the school and wandering into the criminal, for more than six months partly because Haruyuki was too timid to tell his homeroom teacher or the school authorities about what was going on, but the fact that their hangout behind the air conditioner at the west edge of the roof of the second school building was one of the few places on campus outside the reach of the social cameras also played a large part. It seemed that a map or something of places outside the view of the social cameras was passed around among this kind of outlaw student, so they could carefully select “safe zones” and continue their bullying. This sort of thinking was shared not just among delinquent students, but among adult criminals as well.