Armor of Catastrophe

by Reki Kawahara

  “Aaaah!!” Haruyuki howled. Spending the charge from this clean hit in his special-attack gauge, he fluttered only his left wing with all his might. The explosive propulsion whirled his body around to the right, where his opponent was. Using this force, he delivered a knee kick to Takumu’s side, which was open now that Takumu’s sword was in the air.

  Another hard blow.

  “Ngh!” Takumu let out a low groan. Being the experienced swordsman that he was, however, he didn’t stop moving, but instead tried to launch a blow at Haruyuki’s helmet with the pommel rather than the blade of his sword. Naturally, this attack didn’t fit into the kendo system, but there was apparently this sort of blow to vital points in the art of other swordsmanship.

  His timing was exquisite; Haruyuki wouldn’t be able to dodge in any direction in time. However, Haruyuki deliberately slid the sole of his right foot, which had acted as his pivot before, and dropped his entire body perpendicularly. The hilt of the two-handed sword barely scraped his brow and deflected behind him.

  Takumu seemed momentarily confused by Haruyuki’s evasion with a literal sacrificial throw. In kendo, lower-third attacks essentially did not exist. That said, if Haruyuki kept falling and hit the ground, he would inevitably be immobile, if only for a mere instant. Perhaps intending to pin him there, Takumu raised his right leg.

  But as he fell backward, Haruyuki released thrust from his wings in the direction of his head, just barely above the ground. A sudden slide, as if he were being pulled along by an invisible rope. By the time Cyan Pile’s foot came down heavily on the ground, Haruyuki was springing up in a backward somersault. Haruyuki kept going, intent on a strike to his opponent’s back with the tips of his toes as he vaulted over him.

  Takumu staggered and tried to turn around, while Haruyuki used the momentary flapping of his right wing to slide-dash into his opponent’s blind spot and finally launch a piercing attack with his right hand.

  The strike, colored with the light of the Incarnate, hit Cyan Pile’s left shoulder and ripped the thick armor like it was made of paper.

  This three-dimensional maneuvering, making use of one or both wings for instant slides, was the other technique Haruyuki had been practicing this last while—Aerial Combo. As long as his special-attack gauge was charged up about 10 percent, he could activate the technique and connect the combos endlessly as long as his attacks continued to land. And his movements were extremely irregular, so at first glance, it was basically impossible for an opponent to respond meaningfully. Even the Black King herself had been forced into a defensive battle for nearly a minute.

  “Unhgaaaaah!” With a sharp battle cry, Haruyuki dialed up his combo speed.

  Of course, being a nearly pure-blue type, Cyan Pile’s HP gauge was still more than 70 percent full, even as he took all these clean hits. Silver Crow was basically full, but trying to face his opponent with this kind of rush attack took a delicate timing.

  But Haruyuki had decided to throw away any and every calculation for this fight. Full throttle from start to finish. There were things in the Accelerated World that couldn’t be communicated any other way.

  As his brain shifted to higher and higher gears, Silver Crow’s maneuvering accelerated. His small body danced through space dizzyingly fast, his limbs drawing out an infinity of flowing lines in the air. Sometimes, the Laser Sword and Cyan Blade would crash into each other, and an enormous shock would shake the stage, but Haruyuki still hadn’t taken a clean hit.

  Takumu gradually started responding to the rhythm of the Aerial Combo, but attacks he couldn’t dodge peppered his large body and tore into him. His HP gauge continued to drop until finally it dipped below 50 percent and changed to yellow.

  In the height of the fierce battle, Haruyuki felt like he heard a whisper echoing directly in the back of his mind.

  …Aah…Haru…It’s beautiful. Your fighting is stunning…

  Behind the slits cut into Cyan Pile’s face mask, both eyes narrowed like threads. The pale light weakened and began to blink irregularly.

  …But that beauty…It’s too dangerous. It stirs my spirit. Crush me, make your violence more, more overwhelming. Otherwise, I’ll…

  I’ll want to destroy you.

  Fwshk! His eyes glittered fiercely, and pointed warheads appeared from several holes on Cyan Pile’s chest plate.

  “Ngh!” Haruyuki immediately slid to the right.

  But as if seeing through his dodge, Takumu also quickly whirled his body around. “Splash Stinger!!”

  As Takumu shouted the technique name, several pencil missiles were launched before Haruyuki’s eyes. At this close range, completely avoiding all of them was impossible.

  Dashing backward at high speed, Haruyuki cut down one missile after another with the light swords of both hands. Since this attack wasn’t Incarnate, the missiles themselves couldn’t break Haruyuki’s light aura, but there were just so many of them. By the time he had knocked all the guided missiles out of the air, a gap of nearly fifteen meters had opened up once more between him and Takumu.

  The wind in the stage immediately blew away the black smoke from the explosions. On the other side of it, Cyan Pile stood with his arms dangling by his sides and his head hanging, just as he had at the start of the duel. The aura around the Cyan Blade in his right hand flickered irregularly, indicating that its imagination element was starting to take hold.

  And then Haruyuki noticed another new phenomenon.

  Something like a thin shadow twined itself around the blue-gray avatar’s entire body and rose up toward the sky. He had seen that color before. There was no mistake; it was the same dark aura that had enveloped Bush Utan in the tag-team duel the other day.

  Which meant it was finally waking up. The Enhanced Armament that lived inside Cyan Pile and had granted him the power to simultaneously slaughter the four members of Supernova Remnant.

  Haruyuki took a deep breath. “Go ahead, Taku,” he said clearly. “Use it.”

  Takumu silently raised his head. Haruyuki stared directly at that face and continued. “Use up everything you have. Right? That’s your power now. If you don’t come at me with your all, this fight won’t end. So use it! The ISS kit!”

  Takumu seemed to smile faintly, and started to nod.

  Haruyuki prayed in his heart the words he couldn’t say out loud: Taku, I believe in you. No matter how this fight ends, I believe you can overcome that dark power.

  His friend nodded again, almost as if he were able to hear even this silent prayer.

  The flowing two-handed sword, the materialization of the positive will of the second quadrant, disappeared from his right hand. Blue light encircled his arms once more and turned back into his original Enhanced Armament, Pile Driver.

  Takumu brandished this arm high in the air and sang out quietly yet resolutely, “ISS mode activate.”

  The darkness spilled over.

  10

  Compared with its awesome power, the mysterious ISS kit Enhanced Armament was extremely small as an object.

  It was a black half sphere about five centimeters in diameter, which also looked like a social camera somehow. Bush Utan and Olive Grab had equipped it in the center of their chests. But after Takumu shouted the activation command, the half sphere popped up on the back of his Pile Driver hand. With a snap, a horizontal line ran through the center of the sphere. From there, the surface split into top and bottom, and a single orb appeared from within, reminiscent of the eye of a living creature. It shone wetly, a deep red, the color of blood…

  The light of an overlay of terrifying density and scale then gushed up in a vortex from Cyan Pile’s feet. But it couldn’t actually be called light; it was stained a rich, inky black. No longer the hazy shadow that had enveloped Bush Utan, this was an almost pure aura of darkness.

  Haruyuki desperately braced legs that threatened to crumble under him.

  The force of the gushing aura was also well beyond anything Utan had produced. As proof that this was no
mere light effect, cracks radiated out in circles on the floor from where Takumu stood.

  …Taku…

  “Haru,” Takumu responded gently, perhaps hearing Haruyuki unconsciously calling to his friend in his heart. He indicated the floors above and below and the smattering of pillars with his left hand. When he continued speaking, his voice was quite different from before summoning the kit. Dark, desolate, tinged with a metallic effect. “If we stay in this tiny place forever, you won’t be able to use your full strength, either, right?”

  “Y-yeah. You want to move outside?” Haruyuki judged that somehow Takumu didn’t seem to be experiencing the same level of interference with his mind that Utan and the others had and let out a quiet breath as he asked the question.

  But…

  “No, there’s no need for that,” Takumu murmured and turned the Pile Driver, complete with ISS kit, casually toward the floor. Immediately after that came a level voice, almost entirely without fight, with the technique name.

  “Dark Shot.”

  Instead of the iron spike, a dark beam shot out. In an instant, it had gouged a ten-centimeter hole through the floor and disappeared into the lower floors.

  One, two, three seconds later.

  Haruyuki felt a tremendous vibration pushing upward from directly below him. Before he had a chance to even swallow, the floor cracked into tiny pieces, and a torrent of energy that could only be described as black flames jetted out through the gaps.

  “Hungh!” Gasping violently, Haruyuki reflexively deployed his wings and dashed straight backward. Flipping his body midair, he charged toward the opening to the outside of the condo, flying at top speed with both hands thrust forward. The shock wave pressing up against him from behind shook his body as he managed to leap into the air and soar in a straight line through the sky of the Scorched-Earth stage. Once he confirmed he had gotten more than enough distance, he flipped himself around once more and looked back.

  “Wha…,” Haruyuki gasped, astonished.

  He watched as the thirty-story tower that was the A wing of his condo in the real world shattered into pieces from the ground floor and collapsed.

  It was true that the terrain objects in the Scorched-Earth stage broke fairly easily. But even so, there were limits. Because the destruction of an enormous building like that would rip a duel strategy up from the roots, the system was set up to make such an act take a suitable amount of time and effort. As far as Haruyuki knew, the only Burst Linker capable of destroying a massive building in a single blow was the Immobile Fortress, aka the Red King, Scarlet Rain, when all her Enhanced Armament was fully deployed.

  Unable to believe the sight before his eyes, he blinked repeatedly. But the condo collapsed completely in mere seconds and became an enormous mountain of rubble.

  As if compelled, he checked Cyan Pile’s HP gauge in the upper right of his vision. Despite the fact that Takumu had been pulled into a collapse of this magnitude, it was still just under 40 percent full, right where the damage from Haruyuki’s Aerial Combo had left it. And although this was the Scorched-Earth stage, where the bonus for terrain destruction was weak, his special-attack gauge was at once fully charged.

  Shifting his gaze back to the mountain of rubble, Haruyuki saw a mass of objects on the peak of the pyramid blown off from directly below.

  Appearing from within the smashed rubble was Cyan Pile, in an even more concentrated aura of darkness.

  “Taku,” he murmured hoarsely. But no other words came out.

  This was nothing short of overwhelming, enough to make even shock and fear disappear. After activating IS mode, Bush Utan had also shown a terrifying leap in battle ability, but Takumu’s changed appearance far and away surpassed that. Which meant that this was how deep he had pushed into his heart a pain and suffering that was almost maddening.

  So Haruyuki absolutely couldn’t lose here. If he did nothing, daunted by the power of the ISS kit, the darkness that held Takumu would only increase in strength. Takumu might step into the bottomless hole in his heart, the dark side of the Incarnate that Kuroyukihime, Sky Raker, Niko, and Blood Leopard had warned them about.

  Ever since the backdoor program incident, Takumu had been earnestly trying to get back to his old self. He had transferred from the university-track school in Shinjuku with its cutting-edge education and high-level information to the frequently analog Umesato Junior High, and taken one step after another at his own pace. Haruyuki couldn’t let the malice someone was deliberately spreading interrupt that journey. Somehow, he had to drag Takumu out from the interference of the kit and sever its control over him. And to do that…

  He would win this battle. It was the only way.

  He would win and show Takumu. The power of the positive will. Of the light of hope shining modestly but stronger than anything else.

  Hovering at an altitude of seventy meters, Haruyuki materialized the Laser Sword in both hands.

  Below, Takumu stood at the peak of the rubble mountain and raised the Pile Driver with the ISS kit in it in a leisurely motion, setting his sights on Haruyuki.

  The dark shot released from that barrel before had been tremendously powerful. He wouldn’t be able to repel it with his light swords the way he had Bush Utan’s technique of the same name. But if he could see the launch position and timing, it should be possible to deal with it. His only hope was to dodge it at a distance where he just barely avoided damage and settle this fight in a counter–dive attack.

  Haruyuki stopped his virtual breathing and concentrated all his mental energy on the barrel of the Enhanced Armament Cyan Pile had raised.

  Which was why he was late to notice. That together with Takumu’s whisper of the technique name, the special-attack gauge, not used normally with Incarnate attacks, went from fully charged to completely spent in an instant.

  “Dark Lightning Spike.”

  His friend called out a technique name he had never heard before, and at the same time, it seemed like the barrel of the Pile Driver flashed with black light for an instant.

  That was all. The massive beam that had destroyed the condo, the thunderous roar, the shock wave—none of that. The dry wind of the Scorched-Earth stage blew drearily, and a light sensation stroked his left shoulder.

  “…?”

  Haruyuki suddenly felt his body shaking lightly. At the same time, several small lights cut across the bottom edge of his field of view. Shifting his gaze, he noticed strange objects falling toward the surface of the ground. A silver pole, a few thin panels. What? He strained his eyes and—

  “Ngh?!”

  The moment he realized what those objects actually were, Haruyuki could do nothing but open his eyes wide, dumbfounded, and suck in air. It was—an arm. And a wing.

  Belatedly, he looked at his left shoulder. There was nothing there but a smooth cross section, as if it had been processed with a precise mirror finish. Silver Crow’s left arm and metal wing had been completely removed from the base.

  His body listed heavily. Unconsciously, he increased the thrust from his right wing and tried to maintain his altitude, but this move actually left him unbalanced, and he plunged into a tailspin. Carving out a spiral like the leaf of a tree, he began to plummet toward the earth.

  Just as he was on the verge of crashing into the ground, he recovered from his daze and tried to counterbalance the rotation with his wing, narrowly succeeding in landing on his feet. Still, he was unable to entirely absorb the impact; violent sparks flew from the joints in his knees and ankles. Losing his left arm and wing wholesale caused his gauge to drop 50 percent all at once, dyeing it yellow.

  But more than the amount of damage, Haruyuki felt a massive shock at the thing that had done the damage itself.

  He basically hadn’t seen it.

  He had managed to notice that the shooting effect had drawn a black cross over the barrel of the Pile Driver. But he hadn’t been able to perceive the body of the projectile itself, which had to have crossed the seventy meters bet
ween them.

  There had been a time when Haruyuki struggled forward with absurd special training to avoid a bullet launched from close-up in a VR program he’d made. The result was that currently, as long as he could see the shooter, he could evade even snipers with large rifles fairly consistently. Put another way, if he hadn’t been able to do at least that, he wouldn’t have been able to fly at all, given that there were no obstacles in the sky. And yet not only had he not been able to avoid this shot, he hadn’t even been able to see the projectile’s trajectory. It was completely unbelievable.

  The shock was exceedingly massive, but Haruyuki’s stupefaction there on the ground lasted a mere half second.

  One of a Burst Linker’s most critical abilities was to immediately get their thoughts together and shift their focus to their next move, however unexpected the situation they found themselves in. Haruyuki pushed his surprise aside for the time being and tried to rebuild his strategy for the current situation, in which he was essentially robbed of the ability to fly. In this case, the only chance of winning he could see was to once more bring the fight up close and personal, make it a close-range battle, combining guard reversal and Aerial Combo, even if he just had the one arm and one wing.

  First of all, move!!

  Rebuking himself, Haruyuki stood up to run from the courtyard of his fallen condo to the still-standing B wing.

  However, once again, he was faced with the unexpected situation.

  Whump! The sound of impact shook the ground, interrupting his dash. Staggering, he turned his eyes toward the source of the sound, to where a large avatar had landed on the ground a mere ten meters away. Takumu, who should have been at the top of the mountain of rubble, had leapt down to the courtyard in one bound.

  Heavyweight avatars like Cyan Pile and Frost Horn had the special characteristic of being able to produce a shock wave in the Field by stomping, which obstructed the movement of lightweight avatars. However, the shaking now was less a shock and more a large earthquake. Haruyuki’s feet got caught in the cracks racing out in all directions, and he stumbled while Takumu closed in from behind him in the blink of an eye with a high-speed dash—also nonstandard—and stopped a very short distance away.