Cradle of Stars

by Reki Kawahara

  “Okay!” Takumu said.

  Haruyuki took a deep breath. “One, two, three…”

  ““Burst Link!”” they shouted together.

  The dusk-colored ceiling, the large built-in bookcases, and even the particles of light dancing through the air turned a transparent blue. Haruyuki sprang up in his pink pig avatar and landed at the writing desk beyond his bed. He glanced around the room, but it wasn’t like he was directing with Takumu on the voice call, so there was no one but him there.

  To be more precise, the flesh-and-blood Haruyuki was lying on the bed, but because there were naturally no social cameras in this room, the parts that couldn’t be captured with the Neurolinker’s built-in camera were supplemented by the game system. The face of the real Haruyuki was extremely bland terrain, and looking at it made him depressed, so he whipped his face away and tapped the B icon on his virtual desktop.

  From the Instruct menu that popped open, he moved to the points tab. He then clicked through to the level-up screen and compared the number of Burst Points he currently had with the number he’d use going up from level five to level six. He’d had a fair number of points added to his total when they destroyed Metatron’s first form in the battle at Tokyo Midtown, and just as Takumu said, he had plenty to leave a safe margin.

  Even still, he needed courage to press the button, but if he chickened out now, he would have wasted the point he used to accelerate. He raised the small hooved hand of the pig avatar and went ahead and slammed it down on the button.

  A thrillingly cool chorus of fanfare echoed through his ears, and the number five that showed his current level was wrapped in flames and burned away. The flames danced for a moment in the window before drawing out the number six and disappearing.

  …I did it.

  In the fleeting moment of this thought, Haruyuki stared hard enough to burn a hole in the new Instruct screen that appeared automatically. Displayed there was what might be called one of the greatest joys of the Burst Linker life, the level-up bonus selection menu. The number of options there was the same as it had been up to that point: four.

  The top left was a level-six special attack, Digit Pursuit. The top right was similarly a level-six special attack, Bulletproof. The bottom left was an Enhanced Armament, Lucid Blade. And the bottom right was an enhancement of his flight ability.

  Haruyuki had poured all four of the bonuses he’d been given when he leveled up thus far into enhancing his flight ability. In the duel the other day, the raise-and-drop strategy he’d used on Chocolat Puppeter was a technique made possible precisely because of those enhancements, and he believed he’d made a choice to extract the maximum potential in Silver Crow, such as being able to fly carrying a maximum of four avatars as long as he didn’t try to go fast. But that said, that didn’t mean he was enlightened enough to cut free of worldly desires and immediately push the button on the bottom right.

  “Unh, aaah…Like, the special attacks and the Enhanced Armament, they all look so cool—I mean, strong…I say this every time, but I wish you got a trial period or something.” He folded his short arms and continued to moan and groan.

  Ten seconds later, the conclusion he’d come to was…

  “…I’ll think it over carefully and then decide. I can get my bonus later, after all. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.” Muttering, he made the entire Instruct menu vanish.

  Letting out a long breath, he checked the accelerated time and found he still had twenty-five minutes. He’d gone to all the trouble of using a point, so he decided to make effective use of what was left on the clock and activated the homework app on his virtual desktop.

  “If I was going to end up doing this, I should’ve called Taku and directed.”

  He opened his math homework, which seemed the most difficult. But when his final exam had been given back the day before, he saw the best grade he’d ever gotten—although he still couldn’t begin to compete with Takumu, even if Haruyuki was closing in on Chiyuri—so his awareness of being bad at studying itself was fading just a little.

  “Okay! I’ll solve five—no, four, problems in this acceleration!” he declared to himself as he glared at the first quadratic equation.

  Twenty-five minutes later—1.5 seconds later in the real world—the acceleration ended, and he let out a sigh as he pressed the save button on the homework app.

  “From the sound of the sigh, you either couldn’t decide at all on a level-up bonus, or you were doing homework inside.” Takumu’s laughing voice rang out in his mind.

  Haruyuki had forgotten he was still connected to the voice call. “I-it was homework,” he hurriedly replied. “I decided on the bonus in ten seconds!”

  “Wow. So what’d you pick?”

  “Oh. No. I decided to put off the decision. What bonus did you get, Taku?”

  “I put it off, too, of course. I decided to really think about it before picking.” Under orders from his parent, Takumu had chosen special attacks for the three bonuses up to level four. He seemed to regret this sometimes, but that was probably exactly why he’d decided to really mull it over in his own head.

  “Yeah. If we have time tomorrow, I’ll try talking about it with Kuroyukihime or Master. Although I’m pretty sure they won’t give me any direct advice.”

  Takumu laughed. “No doubt about that. But it’s exciting, huh? …Oh! But, Haru, don’t get all spaced out with your head all over your level-up bonus. The meeting with Great Wall tomorrow is very important. The future of Nega Nebulus kind of rests on it. We have to focus.”

  “Yeah, I know. I won’t let a single word get away from me.”

  “And depending on the situation, maybe…”

  “Huh?” Haruyuki asked. “Maybe what?”

  “Oh, just maybe they’ll ask us to speak, too, you know?”

  Haruyuki felt like Takumu was trying to sneak something by him, but it was usually pointless to press him for details at times like this, so he decided to just let it pass. “True. Anyway…let’s make sure we’re on our toes for real from the moment we enter Shibuya Area tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. I think we’ll have our global connections off, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t challenge us via the local net of some store or something. No matter what happens, it’s our job to protect Master, Haru.”

  “Yup. We can’t let her down!”

  “Yeah!” Takumu shouted.

  Unseen by his best friend, Haruyuki clenched his hand tightly as he ended the call.

  Right…Tomorrow, Kuroyukihime would be stepping flesh and blood into a region controlled by Great Wall, the biggest Legion in the Accelerated World. And moreover, the GW executive knew that. He didn’t think the Green King himself would plan a surprise attack now, but a knight serving his master needed to be ready for any possibility.

  He absolutely could not let his guard down, from the time they left Suginami until the moment they returned. Carving this into his heart, Haruyuki set back to work on his math homework.

  8

  He absolutely could not let his guard down. He had been so firm, and yet…

  Why—? How?!

  “Seriously, how did it end up like this…?” Haruyuki relaxed and leaned against the transparent inner tube.

  The sound of water and the voices of children playing beat against his eardrums. The sunlight pouring in through the windows reflected off the surface of the water around him, flickering irregularly. The water, at a constant temperature of twenty-eight degrees Celsius, communicated a comfortable coolness to his back and limbs.

  Sunday, July 14, one PM. Haruyuki was in a pair of loose surf shorts—Neurolinker on, of course—floating in one corner of the twenty-five-meter pool. The wall on the south side was glass, and it offered a view of the towns of Shibuya, Daikanyama, and Meguro from a height of 150 meters above the ground.

  “Amazing,” Haruyuki murmured. “I’ve never been in a pool this high up before.”

  “Me neither.” Takumu nodded, similarly floating nearby. His
beach shorts were the sporty leggings type, and he had naturally taken off his glasses. He wasn’t using an inner tube or a kickboard, but he was good at anything sporty, so he seemed to be able to float merely by moving his arms and legs slowly. “When I think about this much water being on such a high floor, I get a little nervous, you know?”

  “Um. How many tons of water are in this pool?”

  “It’s about twenty-five meters long, eight meters wide, and a meter and a half deep, I’d say…So calculating from that, the volume’s just three hundred cubic meters. Which means, the weight’s three hundred tons.”

  “Th-three hundred tons! I can’t believe the floor doesn’t collapse.”

  “I’m pretty sure this building’ll be okay. Ravine Square opened up right around the Olympics, so.” Takumu looked up at the summer sky outside the window.

  Shibuya Ravine Square opened the same year as the Tokyo Olympics twenty-seven years earlier, a redevelopment around Shibuya Station. Centered around the forty-six-floor office building Ravine Tower, soaring up to a height of 230 meters on the east side of the station, the complex also included two mixed-use tower condos of 180 meters on the west side of the station, and then the thirty-four-floor commercial South Tower, also 180 meters, on the south side.

  Shibuya Hikarie, which opened in 2012 on the other side of Meiji Street, was actually 180 meters tall, for a total of five skyscrapers clustered together in the small area. Although the name sounded like loving in Japanese, the area’s nickname was actually Ravine, for the “valley” of an urban canyon that the area had turned into.

  The pool in which Haruyuki and his friends were floating was in the high-cost, high-rise hotel in the upper floors of South Tower. As a general rule, it was for hotel-guest use, but they were visiting during the narrow wedge of time between checkout and check-in, so there was basically no one in the pool except Haruyuki and his friends. There were three or four adults in poolside deck chairs and about the same number of seven- or eight-year-olds in the water, and that was it.

  Because they were in the luxury hotel of a skyscraper, he couldn’t help but remember the fierce battle that unfolded two weeks earlier at Tokyo Midtown Tower. In order to slip past the ferocious attack of the Archangel guarding the building and beat down the ISS kit main body, they had investigated the strategy of staying over at the hotel in the top floors in the real world and diving into the Unlimited Neutral Field from there.

  But this strategy had been scrapped due to the wall of the giga-premium lodging fee of thirty thousand yen for one night. Although if they hadn’t had to fight Metatron’s first form head-on, they wouldn’t have met her in her true form.

  Regardless, Haruyuki was generally far removed from luxury lodgings, so how could he allow himself to simply bob along in the pool of this hotel, which was probably in the same price range, when he wasn’t even a hotel guest?

  “Whoa! Wh—! Oooooow!”

  A familiar cry of delight came from him, and Haruyuki turned the inner tube around.

  Trotting out of the locker room was Chiyuri in a shorts-and-top-type swimsuit, and behind her was the girls’ camp of Nega Nebulus plus one—Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Utai, and their guest, Rin Kusakabe, filed in wearing swimsuits of all colors.

  This was not the first time he’d seen the girls in revealing outfits. At the eighth-grade class B’s reverse cosplay Café Animal Kingdom at the school festival, all the girls had been suddenly clad in animal swimsuits with extremely little surface area due to an operation error on Haruyuki’s part, an incident that was still too fresh in his memory.

  But in the end, that had not been reality but an AR image created by their Neurolinkers, and the optical phenomenon that leapt into his IRL eyeballs now was indeed orders of magnitude different in terms of details, texture, and of course, impact.

  No, how can I definitely say that what I’m seeing now is a real scene? What if my Neurolinker was hacked, and a video that would normally be impossible was being projected into my mind?

  “Taku, is that real?” Haruyuki murmured.

  Takumu shifted his fingers to the place on his temple where his glasses usually were and hit thin air. But he didn’t even seem to notice. “I guess we’d find out if we took a visual screenshot. If it’s real, the warning about taking photos without permission should sound.”

  “Makes sense. Okay. I’ll give it a go. It’d be pretty serious if our vision had been hacked.”

  “Okay, I’ll check, too, with video…”

  “Hey! You two! What’re you muttering about?!”

  But fortunately—if you could call it fortunate—Chiyuri reached the deck before Haruyuki and Takumu could open their virtual desktops and fired her superpowerful Chiyuri Beam at them for the first time in a while. “Oh! No way! You weren’t trying to take a screenshot, were you?!”

  A shiver of fear running up his spine at his childhood friend’s sharp intuition, he shook his head at the same time as Takumu.

  ““We weren’t!””

  “So then, what’s that hand about, hanging in the air like that?” she asked, eyebrow arched.

  Their heads shook faster.

  ““Warm-up stretches.””

  “You usually do those before you get in the water, you know.”

  “You too, Chiiko. Make sure to stretch properly before swimming, all right?” Fuko appeared from behind Chiyuri and smiled at Haruyuki and Takumu in the water, who were also smiling. Her bikini and light-blue pareu, complete with ultrathin knee-highs to protect the nanopolymers of her prosthetic legs, looked very good on her.

  Wondering what this particularly earth-shattering Raker Smile meant, Haruyuki brought a stiff smile to his own face, and Kuroyukihime came to stand next to Fuko. She was in a simple black bikini with a violet butterfly pattern.

  The subzero Kuroyukihime Smile was fortunately not activated, and she looked at Haruyuki with a straight face as she spoke. “That inner tube looks comfortable. Is it your own?”

  “Y-yes. The mail yesterday said to bring a swimsuit, so I figured, just in case…”

  “I see. Would you lend it to me for a bit later?”

  “S-sure, of course. However long you want.”

  While they were talking, Utai popped her face out from behind Kuroyukihime. Her swimsuit was an orange one-piece with a large ruffle on the chest. She already had a red polka-dotted inner tube around her waist.

  UI> I BROUGHT AN INNER TUBE, TOO! With a satisfied smile, Utai spun the plastic unit around for them.

  Fuko suddenly picked her up from behind, inner tube and all. “Oh, you! Wearing an inner tube’s against the rules, Uiui!”

  UI> HOW IS IT AGAINST THE RULES?! Utai flailed her legs as she tapped at the keyboard with both hands.

  “Because it makes you too cute, obviously! ” Fuko whirled her around, showing off her surprising arm strength. “So much that I could just toss you in the pool like this!”

  UI> STI@PLSAEEEEEEE

  “Come, come! That’s quite enough, Fuko. Before you throw her in, you have to make sure Uiui warms up, too.”

  “Oh! You’re right. Okay, I’ll let you stretch really well before I throw you in.”

  …You can just throw her in. Or like, if it’s come to this, I feel relieved that Chocolat and the others can’t be here, or like maybe a little sad?

  These thoughts in his mind, Haruyuki couldn’t take his eyes off the enchanting poolside view. But abruptly, the surface of the water rose up roundly right beside him.

  “Wh-whoa?!” Haruyuki reeled with such force that he very nearly did a somersault, and Takumu held down his inner tube.

  Breaking through the surface of the water with a splash was Rin Kusakabe, who had at some point unbeknownst to him dived into the water. Water dripped off her cute clover-patterned tank-top-style bikini and matching headband.

  “Hello, Arita.” Rin looked up at Haruyuki and grinned, water reaching her chin.

  “Oh…H-hello, Kusakabe.”

  The members of Nega
Nebulus—excluding Chocolat Puppeter and her friends who they hadn’t yet met in the real—met up in the morning and took care of their shopping and dinner in Shibuya, but Rin, a member of Great Wall, had joined them here at the pool.

  Haruyuki had only just dueled with her older brother, Ash Roller, the day before, but it had been two weeks since he’d seen Rin, and for a moment, he was at a loss at what to say to her.

  And then Rin placed her slender fingertips on Haruyuki’s inner tube and said in a small voice, “Um. Your inner tube. Would you let. Me also borrow it later?”

  “Oh! O-o-o-o-o-o-of course! Not even later, right now…” He hurriedly lifted it away from his body and set it to float in the water.

  “G-g-g-g-g-go ahead— Huh? Whoa?!”

  The reason Haruyuki cried out and Rin also yelped rather adorably was because someone jumped in from the sky above with a “Hup!” It was none other than Kuroyukihime, who flew right into the hole in the inner tube with a loud splash. Water droplets flew through the air to hit Haruyuki and Takumu in the face.

  “K-K-K-Kuroyukihime, wh-wh-what are—?”

  “I made the reservation, you know, earlier, Haruyuki?” And here, at last, the subzero Kuroyukihime Smile was activated. “Mmm. It is a rather comfortable inner tube, isn’t it? What is it made of?”

  He wasn’t sure just how serious she was when she asked these questions, as she slipped her slender legs out of the inner tube and shifted to a sitting posture.

  “R-right, it’s a nanocrystal elastomer. Lightweight, thin, very elastic, feels good to the touch, and it’s also very resistant,” Haruyuki said, like he was an inner-tube salesperson or something.

  And then from the deck, Chiyuri clapped her hands together with an exasperated expression. “Okay, no more playing! Pay attention! I will now reveal today’s special guest!”

  The four in the water looked up, and Utai and Fuko stood up from their stretches.

  With the seven looking on, a girl with short hair walked briskly out of the locker room. He knew it was a girl because of the snowy-white dress-type swimsuit she wore, but her long, slender physique had a neutral air about it. For a moment, he wondered who it was, but when he saw the semitransparent external Neurolinker equipped on her neck, he finally understood. This was Akira Himi sans glasses—Aqua Current.