by Blitz Kiva
King kept his foot on Duplichiro’s face, as laid-back as he could be. “You realize you can’t beat me, right?”
“Are you so sure about that?” The unexpected voice sent a murmur through the crowd.
It belonged to Ichiro... or rather, Duplichiro. He was speaking for the first time from underneath King’s foot.
“King, you must have worked up some fatigue during the fight,” said the hacked avatar. “Meanwhile, I can always use my GM privileges to wash away all of mine. And not just that... I can manipulate my hitbox and damage dealt, destroying everyone in the area at once.”
A murmur ran through those around them. It was true; if Duplichiro put his mind to it, he could kill everyone there. No matter how superior a fighter King was, Duplichiro might even be able to manipulate his stats if he wanted to.
“Then try it,” King said evenly. “You’re using the old man’s avatar. You’re using his account. If you can do that, go ahead and try.”
Duplichiro and King glared at each other in silence. They could feel a quiet fury behind King Kirihito’s words.
“If you thought you could do an imitation of the old man with your cheap Immortal status, you’ve got another thing coming. I don’t know who you are, exactly, but you should realize that by now.”
“That’s right!” The one who broke the silence with a cry of agreement was, naturally, the leader of the Kirihitters. “It’s not appearance or ability that let you become someone completely. It’s the soul!”
“The passionate desire to be someone else will naturally lead you to the perfect imitation!”
“All you’re imitating is Mr. Tsuwabuki’s strength!”
“Sorry, but could you please shut up?” Iris snapped.
“Yes, ma’am!!!” they responded again in chorus.
Iris tilted her head, considering the situation.
Imitation?
Was he really just trying to become the young heir? Was that the only reason he’d stolen the account? He admired Ichiro Tsuwabuki’s dominant power, and he wanted to wield that power for himself? She couldn’t understand it. She found herself clutching her head in her hands.
King and Duplichiro’s staring contest continued for a while, until at last, Duplichiro lowered his face with a glare, spread the Dragon Wings on his back, and flew off. King was thrown off, but he regained his balance without difficulty and watched Duplichiro disappear into the sky.
He’d run. He hadn’t been defeated, but King had at least succeeded in driving him off.
A cheer echoed through Martial City Delve. Cries of King’s name rang out, while the Kirihitters were crying with emotion. King put one hand on his hip, ran another through his hair, and let out a sigh.
“King, um, good job, I guess,” Iris said.
“Ah, sure.” King sheathed his sword and nodded.
“I wonder if Duplichiro will back down now,” Iris whispered as she gazed up at the sky.
“I doubt it,” King responded, dumping water on her hopes. “If he’d really admitted defeat, he’d have given up the account right then and there. He still has GM privileges, so he’ll probably try to do something else.”
His words caused the tension in the air to grow thicker. The fight wasn’t over yet. What exactly were they doing at the Thistle Corporation headquarters? The players all looked at each other, murmuring about not logging in for a while until the heat died down.
“Oh, how wonderful!”
Through the nervous atmosphere rang the discordant sound of applause.
They looked together and saw Matsunaga standing there. He hadn’t spoken up once during the battle, but he may yet have been there the whole time.
He was smiling.
“Duplichiro isn’t finished yet. He’s going to use his GM privileges to try something else. But he likely won’t use Immortal, or max out his stats, or any other such foolish cheats! Right, King?”
“Yeah, probably not,” King responded ambiguously to Matsunaga’s strangely excited exclamation.
“Good, very good,” beamed Matsunaga. “That’s excellent. You’ve set the table perfectly, King.”
“I didn’t do it for you, Matsunaga.”
While the others stared in astonishment, King alone seemed to have caught on to Matsunaga’s train of thought.
Ah, but Iris and the others knew, too... This was surely the kind of situation Matsunaga had been seeking. The cyber criminal who had hacked Ichiro’s account, and probably the Thistle Corporation’s servers themselves, could now be fought within the game. It was like a situation from a certain anime movie.
“Don’t push this on us.”
“Do it yourself.”
Anyone could have said such things to him, but nobody did.
They were all eager to punch Duplichiro.
“Are you going to participate, King?” Matsunaga asked.
“Um, no, I’m on a trip right now. Do whatever you want,” King said, then immediately logged out.
“Welcome back, Kiryu! It’s an emergency!” Those were the first words out of Asuha’s mouth as Sera woke up and removed the Miraive Gear headset.
Sera was sitting on the bed provided, having logged into the game on the familiar Miraive Gear headset. Sakurako had offered a Cocoon, but Sera was more used to (and more comfortable with) the home console version.
Sakurako stood in the room with... not quite a severe expression, but certainly a troubled smile.
“Ah, but well done, Sera,” she said.
“Ah, sure.”
She must have heard what had happened from Iris, that King Kirihito had transcended Duplichiro’s Immortal status and dragged him down to their level. Sakurako seemed honestly impressed by King Kirihito’s achievement.
It had all been the result of thinking about Duplichiro. No one had known what he might resort to if he’d decided to abandon all of his pride, but Sera had realized that wouldn’t happen.
Essentially, a game was a collision of pride versus pride.
To abandon your pride as a gamer to cheat and step on others might feel good, but that was all it would get you. Eventually, your opponent would get bored, disappointed, and leave the game after one last reproachful look.
If anyone were shameless enough to declare that a victory, then that person would not be a true gamer. They would just be a child.
From what she could see, Duplichiro did count, just barely, as a gamer. At the very least, he believed himself to be a gamer; he had borrowed Ichiro Tsuwabuki’s account in order to bank on his gamer image. That was why Duplichiro was unwilling to rewrite any more data in order to cheat.
“So, miss...” Sera asked Sakurako. “Tsuwabuki, too. What was the emergency you mentioned?”
“Ah, well, you see...” Sakurako’s awkward smile did not falter.
Asuha answered for her. “Itchy says he’s going to America right now!”
What the heck? thought Sera.
4 - Noble Son, Go to America
“M-Miss Sakurako! Your driving...” Asuha stammered.
“Don’t talk, or you’ll bite your tongue!” she snapped back.
A Lincoln was speeding down the highway around sunset. In the driver’s seat sat a maid, and in the back seat sat two middle school students. If you added in the fact that they were heading towards Narita Airport, things just became all the more incomprehensible. But despite its incomprehensibility, there was a perfectly logical explanation behind it.
It had begun with phone call from Ichiro Tsuwabuki.
He had called during the early afternoon, while Sera was still logged in to the game. He had said he was going to America.
Apparently Ichiro had determined that the source of the account hack was coming from there. As a mere user, he could not get involved in the Thistle Corporation’s countermeasures, and it was best that he stay out of them, too. But as an individual, he was free to confront a person responsible for wronging him. It was a truly Ichiro conclusion.
America, of course, was o
n the other side of the globe.
A round trip would take a full day, and considering how long they had planned to stay over, he hadn’t been sure if he’d get back while Asuha and Sera were still in Tokyo. That was why he had asked her to apologize for him.
Asuha and Sera, though, could not accept this. Sera, especially, had come here just to meet Ichiro, and the young gamer’s dissatisfaction at the thought of not getting to meet him shocked both Sakurako and Asuha.
“What about coming to eat my curry?” Sakurako had asked, to which Sera replied (while looking at the plate of chicken tikka masala), “It’s extremely good, but not enough to make it worthwhile.”
They had both insisted that they should get to go to America with Ichiro.
Of course, that was ridiculous, Sakurako thought. They couldn’t leave the country without a passport. But when she brought that up, they immediately went fishing through their bags.
“My family was planning to go to Italy to see Dad after this trip.”
“I always have mine in case Itchy wants to do something crazy!”
It seemed they were extremely well-prepared young people.
Which meant the only other things they needed were Ichiro’s permission and that of the parents. She assumed that Ichiro would probably agree readily enough, and when she called him, that was exactly what happened. He had also asked her to come to Narita with them so that he could give her something.
Asuha’s parents and Sera’s mother had both given their ready assent, as well.
And so, Sakurako ferried them to Narita Airport. Ichiro said he’d bought three first-class seats, so Sakurako could no longer object.
“We’re almost to Narita!” Asuha exclaimed.
“You drive fast, miss,” Sera commented.
“When I was in junior college, I often raced down mountain highways.” Sakurako drove the car into the parking lot and screeched it to a stop.
Asuha’s head hit the glass with a bang.
They took off their seatbelts and got out. The doors slammed closed as they charged their way into Narita Airport. Among the people bustling about, they were able to find the cool-as-a-cucumber Ichiro immediately. He had no luggage, naturally. He was the kind of man to buy whatever he needed at his destination.
“Ichiro-sama!”
“Itchy!”
As they ran up to him, Ichiro held up a hand and responded in his usual way. “Hey there, Sakurako-san, Asuha, and...” Ichiro’s gaze moved to the person behind them, a shifty-eyed child carrying a travel bag. “Hello, King.”
“Hey.”
Sakurako gulped.
Ichiro and Sera Kiryu faced each other. They both knew what the other looked like, and they’d spoken many times in the game, but this was their first time meeting in person. Sakurako couldn’t imagine what they might say to each other after everything they’d been through. She watched the two stare at each other and waited for their next actions.
But nothing else came.
Sakurako’s surprise was interrupted by Ichiro addressing her. “Well, I’ll take the two of them into my custody now. I believe we’ll be back tomorrow night at the earliest, but I can’t be certain.”
“Ah, um, er, yes.” Sakurako nodded fervently.
“Where are we going, old man?” Sera asked.
“Pittsburgh. There’s no direct flight, so we’re going through Chicago. I’ll explain in more detail later.”
“Itchy! What about Seattle? Are we going to Seattle?” Asuha asked.
“No. We’re not going to New York or Miami, either.”
“Aw...” Asuha had likely wanted to visit cities whose baseball teams had players she rooted for, and she pouted openly when told she couldn’t. It seemed even a self-proclaimed Dragons fangirl like herself was eager to see a Major League game.
As Ichiro now turned back to Sakurako, she remembered that he had said he wanted to give her something. Sakurako returned her face to its servant’s calm and straightened up a bit.
“I introduced Shaga to Thistle,” said Ichiro. “I think with him around, they should be able to work things out, and depending on how hard they work, I expect things to calm down within two or three days. I’ll be taking action, as well, which means we may settle things as early as tomorrow. Therefore...” As he spoke, Ichiro put his hand into his inner jacket pocket and produced a card from it.
Sakurako gasped.
He offered it to her.
“Sakurako-san, I want you to keep my avatar in check until then. This will cover any costs you may have.”
“Huh? B-But this is...” She took it reflexively, but couldn’t hide her hesitance. The cool card felt pleasant on her fingertips.
Ichiro smiled brightly. “No need to be reticent. Do as you wish with it.”
It was easier said than done.
Sakurako had several credit cards Ichiro had given her for work, to purchase cooking ingredients, cleaning products, utensils, and such. They were all black cards. Sakurako had an excellent sense of balance, and she had managed to hang on to her middle-class common sense, but she had never expected to be handed a card as rare as this.
“Hey, Kiryu. What’s that?” Asuha asked.
“Dunno. It looks like a credit card, but I didn’t know they made them out of silver.”
Silver? Outrageous. This was palladium.
Cards made of palladium were a status symbol for the absolute wealthiest people in the world. They belonged only to those who had accounts with JP Morgan’s private bank.
Was Ichiro asking her, of all things...
Was he asking her to use that for the game?
“On my own discretion, I contacted Thistle’s payment agency, and it should be about twenty-four hours before they shut down the game’s microtransactions system,” said Ichiro. “There are ways to halt the modules in the server itself, too, and that might make it even faster. Until then, you can use it as much as you like.”
In this moment, Sakurako was truly being entrusted with the power of Ichiro Tsuwabuki’s money.
Processing the weight of it anew, she took in a deep breath, tucked the palladium card safely away, then faced her master Ichiro and bowed reverently.
“Thank you, sir.”
It was evening.
Edogawa had been prepared to pull an all-nighter from the start, and he wasn’t going to complain given everything else going on. Still, when he thought about the work that lay ahead of him, he couldn’t help but feel a deep and abiding depression. He looked around and noticed that the others in the office must have felt the same way; they looked like walking corpses.
Edogawa’s mood grew even darker as he gazed at the empty bottles littering his desk. The more energy drinks he drank, the more he was beginning to think they were completely useless. If they were supposed to provide a placebo effect, it was backfiring. Perhaps attempting to force the human body past its limits was a fool’s errand from the start; it was just too fragile for this sort of thing.
Deciding to get some fresh air, he staggered to his feet, left the office, and descended the stairs.
He had a lot of tasks to see to. He was being asked to check all the server logs and scrutinize any data that seemed to suggest an attack. Then on top of that, as an outsider, he was supposed to check for signs of data being illegally leaked from inside company computers. Meanwhile, Thistle’s engineers were out in full force, trying to take back their servers and purge suspicious data. The office had become a total battlefield.
It was in the middle of this bloodbath that the lawyer Ichiro Tsuwabuki had recommended had arrived. He seemed like an unsavory sort, dressed in an Armani suit that seemed wrinkled and worn out, and he was tall and gangly, with shaggy hair. His name was Shunsaku Shaga, and he bore a passing resemblance to a famous late actor.
First, the lawyer had consulted with Azami on how the company should proceed. In reality, everyone present had just wanted to fix the problem and find the cause as soon as possible, but they’d known that scre
aming like children wouldn’t make that any more possible.
The lawyer had advised them to avoid making any announcements until they had fully grasped the situation, while asserting that they had to make a statement within 24 hours to reassure people that they were on the case. In other words, they had one day’s time to make some kind of progress.
Edogawa found it all extremely unreasonable, but if this was his client’s decision, he had no choice but to go along with it. He sent a plea to the president of System Ajax asking him to send help as soon as possible, and was told they’d send support first thing in the morning.
The working hours to salary ratio at Edogawa’s company suggested an exploitation of their employees, but at times like these, he was grateful for the president’s attitude.
If they held a press conference too soon, they wouldn’t be able to deal with reporters’ follow-ups, so he could understand why they shouldn’t make an announcement until they had answers to give to the expected questions. He really wasn’t fond of it, to be honest, but he had checked every file in every computer of every worker within the company. (He’d found a lot of unpleasant files there, but he’d managed to ignore those.) And while he felt he was being as diligent as one could be, he still hadn’t found any traces of a data leak.
If he absolutely couldn’t find anything, the lawyer had advised him to fudge the truth to find a way to ride it out. Tsuwabuki had said the man had an awful personality, and maybe this was what he meant—he really had a lot of nerve. As if to punctuate that assertion, the lawyer was apparently snoring away in the break room at this very moment.
The problem was the checking of the server logs. The Thistle Corporation itself was a small business, but they oversaw server machines in numbers sufficient to run a much larger company’s online network. There was no way Edogawa could check all of them in just 24 hours by himself; his performance was going to be in the pits after an all-nighter as it was. All he could do was wait for his boss’s reinforcements and hope.
How had things come to this?
Edogawa walked outside, squinting in the sunlight, which was still intense despite the late hour. He knew that thinking about it wasn’t getting him anywhere. He was furiously angry, and it frustrated him to have nowhere to direct that anger.