Haruyuki held his breath and drew it in as close as he dared. Once the 1.5-meter ebony sphere was practically on top of him, he shot upward. With a cumbersome movement, the black sphere curved in the same direction to chase after him.
In the former Nega Nebulus’s Castle mission, Aqua Current, the leader of the Seiryu attack squad, stayed alone deep on the bridge to allow her comrades to escape and was hit with this black spherical body any number of times. According to her, the black ball didn’t disappear with a direct hit, but instead swallowed the avatar up and began to first eat away at their burst points. Once these were down to zero, it took a level from the Burst Linker, stunning them in the process, and then, finally, the black ball would disappear. That alone was plenty threatening, but what was even more terrifying was that, by the time the level drop came, all the Linker’s points had been completely wiped out, so the next time they were hit with the black ball, there would be no grace period; their level would immediately drop down one more.
Put another way, if you could quickly destroy the black ball in the initial point-draining stage, you wouldn’t lose a level. But that was a fairly difficult task. The sphere was made out of a highly viscous fluid, and close-range physical attacks were essentially useless. Long-distance attacks, bullets, and lasers all passed through it, and it was quite resistant to fire as well, so there was a strong possibility that the avatar would die before the ball evaporated. Current thought the only tactic that might work was basically to freeze and break the ball.
Unfortunately, none of their current party could use ice techniques. And dying immediately after getting hit with the black ball would have almost been a better choice, but if they died in the God’s territory, there was the risk of not being able to make it out and getting stuck in Unlimited EK. In the end, the best countermeasure was…
“…Shake it off…!” Haruyuki cried in a strained voice. He turned once more, and the end of the bridge came into view. The dark sphere again followed, trailing a tail of sparks.
The orb accelerated without limit when moving in a straight line, so you had to force it to slow down by making it change direction over and over. This was no easy feat above the bridge when it was only thirty meters wide, but if you could also turn up and down and not just left and right—in other words, if you were Silver Crow and had the ability to fly—you might be able to keep running for long enough to get away entirely.
This was the reason Sky Raker had been assigned the role of rescuing Aqua Current, while Haruyuki had stayed with the attack team: to keep his special-attack gauge full and deal with Level Drain.
“Hnn…ngaaah…” He gave his everything to fleeing from the nihilistic lump of liquid, which vibrated unsettlingly as it pursued him. He would fly straight ahead for a few seconds, and then as soon as he sensed the black ball accelerating, turn on a dime. He had trained a fair bit with this zigzag technique during his regular duels with Ash Roller, but the stakes were much higher now. At all costs, he had to avoid turning the wrong way toward Seiryu, or flying out to either side of the bridge. Mustering whatever scrap of spatial awareness there was in his mind and whipping around with dizzying speed, he inched steadily toward the other side of the bridge.
Below him, his comrades were also running full tilt for the border. And although he couldn’t see them, Sky Raker—Aqua Current in her arms—would have been on a landing course beyond the black clouds in the sky above. Twenty seconds left until the completion of the mission…
—Small transient ones.
—You do well to struggle.
Haruyuki heard the faint splashing of water, and then a fierce cold wrapped around his entire body. As the world whirled around him, he caught a glimpse of Seiryu launching a second black ball, which quickly began to accelerate in a straight line. And not at Haruyuki. Greedily vibrating, the nihilistic lump charged toward his comrades on the bridge.
“You have to run…!” Haruyuki squeezed out a shout that was more like a shriek as he continued his desperate and random flight.
Running, Kuroyukihime glanced back and saw the black ball closing in. But it was too late. With no twists or turns to navigate, the black ball picked up speed like a bullet shot from a gun and was on the verge of swallowing one of his friends up.
A crimson shadow shot out like lightning—Blood Leopard, who had transformed into Beast mode at some point. The animal avatar fluidly leapt forward from a sharp turn and threw herself at the black sphere. The others stopped in their tracks, radiating shock.
The ball caught Leopard, and the sparks on its surface began to pulsate. Waxing and waning cyclically, it reminded him of the peristalsis of certain blood-drinking creatures— No, it actually was sucking, drinking. All the burst points Leopard had accumulated over such a long time. And when it had finished sucking those up, she would be plunged into the nightmare of level drop.
“Pard…!” A cry shot out of Niko. She raced over to Leopard, crouched inside the black ball, and moved to thrust her hand into the sparking liquid. Kuroyukihime stretched a sword hand out to try to stop her, but couldn’t reach her. The small, slender fingers were very nearly touching the ebony sphere.
But before they could, Leopard howled, ferociously. The claws of her four paws dug into the iron bridge surface, and the crimson cat pulled away from Niko and began running. The sphere enveloping her body continued to pulsate, so her points had to have been dropping with terrifying speed. Those points could have fallen to zero at any moment, allowing the ball to steal a level and stun her into a motionless state, but the leopard’s hard run did not stop. The edge of the bridge was just over a hundred meters away.
Even as he zigzagged above their heads, Haruyuki kept an eye on Leopard racing ahead and the others chasing after her. Staring at the ferocious beast avatar, beautiful even with her torso swallowed up by the black ball, a voice abruptly came back to life in his mind.
—At any rate, it was exactly for this that Pard’s sealed away leveling up until today, after all.
Niko had said this in the student council office at Umesato Junior High before the dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field. Blood Leopard was a fairly senior Burst Linker and a soldier who had made a name for herself at the dueling mecca of Akihabara Battle Ground, and she had alluded to having a reason for still being at level six, but Haruyuki hadn’t understood what she meant at the time.
“For this”—for the mission to rescue Aqua Current, Leopard had stayed at level six. She had built up a stock of burst points acquired in duels and Enemy hunting without spending them. The years of effort and endurance had all been for this moment. So that even if the black sphere hit her, she could keep running without losing a level. Using her vast cache of points as cushioning, she would have been able to hold on against Seiryu’s most brutal attack for a while. All of it was for the moment someday when she would rescue Aqua Current from the God’s altar.
In a flash of insight, Haruyuki understood the relationship between Aqua Current, one of the Elements, the senior executive group of the Black Legion, Nega Nebulus; and Blood Leopard, one of the Triplex, the senior executive group of the Red Legion, Prominence. Although they belonged to different Legions, the two had a similar air about them—they were parent and child.
“…Pard! You can do it…!!” Haruyuki shouted, as he made one sharp turn after another.
Perhaps hearing him, perhaps not, Leopard kicked even more ferociously at the ground and leapt high, high up into the air. At the peak of her trajectory, a faint rainbow rippled outward through the air. Leopard pushed through this, and the ebony sphere that had engulfed her torso broke, scattering into countless droplets. The crimson leopard spun around once in the air before touching down smoothly, the claws of her four paws biting not into dull steel but cracked gray asphalt.
Right behind her, Haruyuki also crossed the dividing line between bridge and earth. And behind him, the black sphere smashed into an invisible wall and flew apart. The instant he felt the crisis averted, all the strengt
h drained from his body, and Haruyuki half-fell from the sky. Unable to really stick the landing, his legs crumpled beneath him when he contacted the earth, and he ended up on all fours.
But it was too soon to collapse just yet. Seiryu might come at them with another attack before Kuroyukihime and the others broke free. He tried to stand up, he tried to put strength into his trembling legs when—
“…It’s okay” came a quiet voice beside him.
Lifting his head, he saw Blood Leopard. Following the gaze of the entirely graceful and brave animal avatar—even as she was, like him, on all fours on the ground—Haruyuki turned around.
Ardor Maiden, leading the group, was at that moment about to leap off the bridge. Then Lime Bell and Cyan Pile. Lastly, Black Lotus and Scarlet Rain. It seemed that the God Seiryu had abandoned its pursuit when both of its black Level Drain orbs were scattered in all directions.
Still on his hands and knees, Haruyuki looked up at the Super-class Enemy hovering a mere hundred meters away. He could no longer read any emotion in the cold shine of the sapphire eyes. Perhaps because he had left its territory, he also couldn’t hear the voice that had echoed in his memory several times. But even so, Haruyuki felt it, the dark, massive, lapis lazuli dragon sneering as if giving them advance notice of their eventual reunion.
Long body undulating, it began to lumber about, changing direction. Its four limbs and their talons, alongside the four pairs of small wings, cut across his vision one after another. Then, the tip of the tail—cut off in Kuroyukihime’s Incarnate attack—finally reappeared with soundless regeneration.
The group watched without a word as the massive dragon leisurely flew away and slowly faded out of existence. Finally, the Super-class Enemy, the God Seiryu, vanished as though sucked into the altar five hundred meters away. The watch fires at each corner of the altar then disappeared in turn, and the Century End stage was returned to silence.
—No.
He could still hear some kind of sound. A high-pitched resonance, like the howling of the wind, like a reed pipe. Hands once planted on the ground, Haruyuki staggered to his feet and turned his head to the sky. Gradually getting closer, the sound was coming from the other side of the thick layer of black clouds hanging above them.
A few seconds later, a tiny blue light flickered inside the clouds. Glittering like a shooting star, it fell gently down like a bit of fluff. While they held their collective breath and stared up at it, the source of the light finally pushed through the clouds and revealed itself—the flames of boosters, narrowed down to minimum output.
As the light came closer, the figures of the sky-blue avatar with the booster-shaped Enhanced Armament on her back and the light-blue avatar she held in her arms popped up in the night sky. Reflecting back a pale light, the pair descended ever so slowly. A mere five meters or so from the ground, the jet propulsion flames shuddered irregularly and disappeared. The booster’s energy gauge was empty.
Haruyuki immediately leapt up and caught the falling avatars in his arms. Before his eyes were two smiling face masks. One of those mouths moved, and a gentle murmur reached his ears:
“Thank you, Corvus.”
The other avatar was silent, but the blue eye lenses on the other side of the flowing-water armor blinked softly.
Haruyuki set them down on the ground and took a few steps back to stand alongside Chiyuri and Takumu. A single sentence kept playing over and over and over in his mind:
…She’s back. She’s back. She’s. Back.
…For over two and a half years, she had been sealed away on Seiryu’s altar. One of the Four Elements, the bouncer who had saved Haruyuki when he was facing total point loss eight months earlier, The One, Aqua Current. In the true sense of the word, she had finally come home to Nega Nebulus—to the Accelerated World.
As he stared, moved to tears, the flowing-water avatar gave them all a meaningful glance before finally facing the crouching crimson leopard a little ways off. Accompanied by the babbling of a brook, she walked over, knelt down, and wrapped both arms around the leopard’s neck. She brought her face in close and hugged tightly, so tightly.
“Welcome back, Aki.” The fang-filled mouth opened, and Pard offered a brief greeting to her parent.
Current nodded softly. “I’m home, Myah,” she replied, as brief as her child. The others watched as the two soundlessly brought their faces together.
After a few seconds, once Current got back to her feet and Leopard returned to human form with the Shape-Change command, Niko slapped her left hand against the fist of her right and shouted, “Allll right! That is mission complete!”
The instant he heard this, the tension in him was suddenly released, and Haruyuki very nearly slumped to the ground again on weak legs. Someone supported him from behind, and convinced it was Takumu, he leaned back without restraint and let out a long breath.
But it was an unexpected voice that he heard:
“You did well, Crow.”
Jumping, he looked back to find the mirrored goggles of the Black King. Flustered, Haruyuki tried to stand up on his own, but Kuroyukihime had turned toward everyone else and begun to talk, so he missed his chance to pull away.
“And all of you, you really did well. You withstood the fierce attacks of the God Seiryu and brought Current back to us. Not to mention that not only did no one else get sealed away, but we didn’t see a single death. This is nothing short of a miracle made real by the hard struggle of everyone here. However.”
Kuroyukihime stopped for a moment to look at Niko and then Leopard.
“Unfortunately, we did not escape unscathed. First of all, Rain, I apologize for essentially destroying your Enhanced Armament, and I thank you. If we had not had that armor, we would never have been able to make it so deep into the Enemy camp.”
“W-well, it was just, you know, you throw me another curry party, and we’ll call the whole thing even.” The Red King bobbed the antennas on her head as if embarrassed. “Oh! But actually, curry three times in a row, it’s, you know…Maybe hamburgers next time? Nah, more Japanese-style, an okonomiyaki party.”
“…Mm? Hasn’t it been two times?”
“What are you talking about? Yesterday—” The Red King abruptly cut herself off, and Haruyuki jumped and stiffened, too.
After the Territories the previous day—June 29—not only had Niko barged into the Arita house and made curry with Haruyuki, but she had stayed over, on top of that. And most likely, the only other person who knew that was Pard.
Kuroyukihime stared suspiciously at the unnaturally silent Niko and Haruyuki, the latter of which was still frozen in place with her support from behind, but she resumed her speech soon enough. “…Well, I don’t care if it’s hamburgers or okonomiyaki or Buddha Jumps Over the Wall…It’ll be after all of this is over.”
“R-right, right. Basically, my Enhanced Armament recovers when I dive again, y’know? …But…” The Red King stopped and turned green eye lenses on her deputy, the person she likely trusted more than anyone else.
Kuroyukihime also looked over at Blood Leopard standing alongside Current and nodded slowly. “…Yes. While there is Rain’s loss, we cannot even begin to imagine the damage Blood Leopard took…”
“…What do you mean, Lotus?” Fuko asked, cocking her head to one side. She had been flying through the sky high above, so she hadn’t witnessed the scene.
“In the very end, Seiryu attacked with Level Drain.” Kuroyukihime lowered her eyes and explained in a tense voice. “Just as planned, Crow managed to draw the sphere out of the area for us with his desperate flight, but…I never dreamed it would attack again in quick succession…”
“…! So then, Pard was…”
“Mm. Leopard risked her life to defend us against the second orb. She ran out of the area still in the drain status, and although she managed to avoid a level drop, she must have lost an incredible number of points…”
None of them could say anything to this; they simply stared at Bl
ood Leopard.
“NP.” The crimson leopard-person shrugged as though it was seriously no big deal. “Points I saved for this anyway. Can just earn more.”
The very first to react was Aqua Current.
“I told you.” Akira brought the palm of her hand to Leopard’s cheek with a muttered sigh. “You were supposed to forget me.”
“Can’t forget your parent.”
“Stubborn as ever, Myah.”
Removing her hand and taking a step back, Akira bowed her head deeply first to Pard and then to Niko. “Thank you, Blood Leopard and the Red King, Scarlet Rain. I will take responsibility for the points Leopard lost in rescuing me and replenish them in full. It might take a little time, but I will absolutely do this.”
“I’ll help, too.” Fuko jumped in before Pard or Niko could react. “Target period of a week, yes?”
“I shall also assist.” Utai also raised her right hand without a moment’s delay. “I do feel bad for the Enemies, but I’ll hunt and hunt and hunt and hunt!”
“In that case, I’ll get serious myself. I will give you an ample demonstration of the skill of the hunter they used to call the Genocider in the Shibuya area.” When even Kuroyukihime put her name forward like this, the three junior members of Nega Nebulus couldn’t stand by in silence.
Takumu, Chiyuri, and Haruyuki all took a step forward together and declared in unison:
“Of course, I’m not that strong, but I’ll do what I can!”
“I—I—I mean, it’s not much, but I have this search function called Enemy Detector—”
“Detector, schemector. We can just call them with my Acoustic Summon!” Chiyuri cried out forcefully, waving the large bell of her left hand around. “I’ll go calling all the Enemies and healing all the dama—” Both voice and movement stopped abruptly, so Haruyuki looked at his childhood friend questioningly.
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