Archangel of Savage Light

by Reki Kawahara

  “B-but, Curren.” Haruyuki took a step forward and gave voice to one of the many questions that popped up into his mind. “When you were at level one, you still had lots of abilities, right?”

  In addition to the Hydro Auditory she revealed in the Territories the previous day, which turned all of a stage’s water into her own personal sound system, Aqua Current had a group of abilities such as being able to slide down water surfaces and envelop companions in her water armor, an impossible diversity for a level one.

  “I didn’t get those abilities through level-up bonuses,” Akira replied smoothly. “Just like your Aviation and Optical Conduction, they came to me suddenly in the middle of battle. So they didn’t go away even after I leveled down.”

  “Ohhh…” Haruyuki let out a large sigh of admiration.

  Aqua Current had long worked as the bouncer to protect newbie Linkers on the verge of total point loss and had also been given the nickname The One, with the idea that she was the most powerful level one in the Accelerated World. Haruyuki himself had once been saved by her in a pinch. This strength of hers had been refined precisely because she had endured the terrifying adversity of the level drop.

  Entire body dyed the color of the evening sun, the flowing water avatar looked around at the others. “The reason I didn’t explain the secondary effects of Level Drain before,” she said in a tone slightly more clipped than usual, “is because I didn’t want you to decide to fight Seiryu in order to reselect level-up bonuses. I think you all noticed this in the mission there, but unless a fixed period of time passes in the battle—or more likely, it gets angry for real—my impression is that Seiryu doesn’t use Level Drain. If you go for an easy fight, there’s a fairly strong possibility you’ll die before you get to that stage. It’s totally impossible to just set foot on the bridge, get your level lowered, and then make a quick getaway.”

  “Mm, that’s exactly right,” Kuroyukihime said. “But it’s all right, Curren. Not a soul here regrets their own choices. And Leopard, you can’t be saying that you’d really and deliberately go for level down.”

  Pard nodded, almost as if to say “of course.” “Y. I mentioned the possibility of bonus reselection because I wanted Current to tell us this. My short temper’s one thing, but, Curren, you need to fix this habit of holding everything in.”

  “…”

  Her child held nothing back in letting her know what was what, and Akira let a hint of a wry laugh bleed across the water covering her face mask. “I’ll try. I’m still holding onto all kinds of things, but I’ll tell you bit by bit.”

  “K.” Pard took a step back from the tower wall and tossed Niko from the crook of her arm high up into the air directly above her.

  “Whaaaaa?!” The Red King, likely the lightest avatar there, flew up into space, screaming.

  “Shape Change.” Once she had transformed from human to leopard, she caught Niko on her back.

  “Uh, so, Pard, you just said you were going to work on your impatience!” her Legion Master shrieked.

  “Work target,” Pard replied, setting her right now-front paw, after the Change, to tap on the tower wall. After pressing the pads of that paw against it a few times, she nodded as if satisfied and then smoothly climbed the vertical surface about three meters up. Panicking, Niko, on her back, grabbed at her neck.

  “K. I can prob’ly make it to the top.”

  “P-prob’ly?!”

  “…Most likely.”

  “M-most likely?!”

  The two members of the Red Legion went back and forth, a perfectly timed comedic duo.

  “Roger.” Fuko waved and smiled. “Then we’ll see you at the top.”

  “K.” Pard began to run up the slick marble wall. Running up a wall didn’t look all that extravagant, but it was a relatively rare and powerful ability. And combined with Blood Leopard’s inherent agility, it was basically the same as there being no obstacles in a stage.

  Eeeaaaah! Niko’s voice—maybe a scream, maybe a cheer—receded, and once they could no longer hear it, Fuko smiled happily.

  “…Prominence’s increased their power quite a bit with this, hmm? I’m really looking forward to the day when our Legions fight.”

  “Mm-hmm. We also must get stronger for that,” Kuroyukihime responded, bringing her gaze back to earth. “Now then, we should go, too. Who will you carry, Raker?”

  “Goodness! You have to ask?” Fuko spread her hands out slightly as if to indicate that it went without saying, and then suddenly vanished from the wheelchair. With a speed on par with teleportation, she had moved directly behind Utai. The small shrine maiden’s face stiffened and she tried to leap away, but two hands yanked her off the ground.

  “Auunh, I—I was careless.” Utai’s arms and legs hung limply, as though she had resigned herself to her fate of being a tightly held sack of potatoes.

  “It’s all right, Maiden,” Fuko declared lovingly. “I won’t drop you or anything today.”

  “O-of course you will not!”

  Kuroyukihime shook her head in exasperation at the seasoned duo of ICBM and Testarossa—and their act so reminiscent of the two members of the Red Legion—and then turned back to Haruyuki. “Which means, Crow, that you end up carrying Pile, Bell, Curren, and me. So? Can you do it in one go?”

  “Yes, that’s okay!” Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down, while Chiyuri looked on slightly skeptical. But this time, his promise was not baseless and ill-conceived. During the mission to subjugate the fifth Chrome Disaster six months earlier, Haruyuki had flown nonstop the five kilometers from Suginami to Ikebukuro with Black Lotus under his right arm, Scarlet Rain in his left, and Cyan Pile hanging from his legs.

  This time, there was the addition of Aqua Current, and Lime Bell was a bit heavier than Rain, but as long as he didn’t go too fast, he should have been able to lift four people at once over a distance of three hundred meters.

  “Okay then, Lotus, we’ll go on ahead.” Holding Utai in front of her, Fuko stored her wheelchair and summoned Gale Thruster, waved her right hand in the air, and then looked up at the sky. She bent her knees and jumped lightly while at the same time igniting the boosters. Glittering with a blue light, the flames of propulsion immediately receded into the twilight.

  “Now, shall we go as well?” As she spoke, Kuroyukihime brought her body close to Haruyuki’s right arm.

  This was, of course, not their first tandem flight, but when he touched his beloved swordmaster, even though they were both avatars, his heart pounded as usual. Still, he managed to smoothly lift her by her narrow waist, and breathing a sigh of relief to himself, he stretched out his left hand to Chiyuri. “C’mon, Chiyu. Hurry up.”

  “You are weirdly used to this.”

  “I—I am not! I—I—I don’t care if you hang from my legs instead!”

  “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Please and thank you.” Chiyuri leaned—almost slammed—into him.

  Once he had his left arm around her, this time without any excessive heart pounding, Haruyuki had a sudden thought: If Takumu grabbed onto his legs like last time, how would he hang onto Aqua Current?

  “It’s fine,” Akira said, as if reading his thoughts. She approached from the front to wrap both her arms around his neck. Before he had a chance to panic and freak out, the water film covering Current’s entire body was adhered to Crow’s silver armor; it was probably an application of her ability to slide down walls. In which case, even if Haruyuki didn’t support her, she likely wouldn’t fall.

  After securing the three on his upper body, Haruyuki spread his wings and vibrated them carefully. He slowly left the ground and went into a hover about a meter and a half in the air. “You’re good, Taku. Sorry for putting you on the bottom all the time.”

  Cyan Pile grabbed on tightly right away from behind—or he should have, but there was no response, so Haruyuki called to him once more. “Taku?”

  “Oh. Right, sorry, Haru. Thanks.” This time, there was a response, and the sturdy arms wrappe
d tightly around both of Silver Crow’s legs.

  Haruyuki gradually increased his thrust until Cyan Pile’s legs were off the ground and then turned his eyes upward.

  Fuko and Utai had morphed into a missile and shot upward so quickly that they were already out of sight, but he still could spot a small shadow moving along the wall high up in the distance. It looked like Pard was also going to make it to the top without her ability’s effect running out midway.

  “Okay, here we go!” Haruyuki called, increasing the frequency of his silver wings’ vibration.

  Vwwm! A sense of gravity akin to the departure of an elevator came over him and then quickly changed into a floating sensation. Maintaining a distance of five meters or so from the tower wall, he ascended at a fixed speed. His special-attack gauge started to drop in the upper left of his field of view, but as long as he stuck to eco-flying mode, it looked like it would last long enough.

  “Wow!” Chiyuri let out a cry of delight. “There’s, like, all these temples over there! Haru, move a little to the left!”

  “Uh, um, so…if my gauge runs out, use Citron Call.” Grumbling, Haruyuki moved horizontally from the south side to the west. While he was at it, he turned his body to the left, and the center of Twilight-stage Tokyo spread out before him.

  To his right, he could see a vast space encircled by a bottomless pit—the Castle where the fierce battle with Seiryu had only just played out. But Chiyuri was likely talking about the group of high-rise temples standing in a row in front of that. The floors supported by (probably) Corinthian columns were stacked in several layers, so that the whole thing looked like a future city in the style of ancient Greece.

  In the face of the magnificent panorama, Haruyuki forgot to even complain, and as he gazed at the view, Kuroyukihime stretched out the sword of her right arm.

  “That area is Kasumigaseki and Nagatacho. From the right, it’s the Ministry of Finance; the Ministry of Agriculture; Forestry and Fisheries; and the Cabinet Office. The short, large one beyond that is the National Diet Building. Didn’t you go there on a social studies field trip in elementary?”

  “Oh! We did!” Chiyuri beat him to the punch. “We did go! Haru got lost inside, and it turned into this whole thing!”

  This was confidential information his childhood friend was spilling, so Haruyuki hurriedly tried to fix it. “I—I wasn’t lost! I was exploring! There’s a secret room in the Capitol Building in the US, so I just figured maybe there was one in the Diet Building in Japan…”

  “That’s from a movie we watched way back when! There aren’t any secret rooms in the US or in Japan!”

  “How can you be so sure?! It’s a secret! They keep it hidden from the people!”

  “No way. You believe that?! Even now, in eighth grade?!”

  “Wh-whatever! It’s fine! There’s no age limit on imagination!”

  Haruyuki and Chiyuri continued to bicker and ruin the hard-won view, when abruptly, a giggle slipped out of Current, pressed up against his chest.

  “Truly, a very Crow episode. I apologize for destroying the mood, but I think there is perhaps a way to check if there actually is or isn’t a secret room.”

  “What?! D-do you mean sneak in?”

  Now it was Kuroyukihime’s turn to laugh at the dumbfounded Haruyuki. “Is that it? I see. Check in the Accelerated World rather than the real? If there are social cameras in this secret room or what have you, then it would be generated on this side as well. The building structural changes in the Twilight stage are extreme, but, right…if it were a Factory stage or a Steel stage…”

  “Oh, I get it! Okay, so let’s go check it out on our next day off!”

  “What?! You just denied the whole idea a minute ago!”

  And so they went on. Haruyuki continued to gain altitude at a fixed pace, and finally, the Castle and the National Diet Building were hidden beneath thin clouds. Turning his gaze skyward once again, he saw the edge of the tower now cut a clean curve into the twilight sky. The four who had gone ahead had presumably already landed; he could see no sign of them.

  As expected, it looked like he’d have a little extra in his special-attack gauge, so he sped up for the last thirty meters and flew over the old Tokyo Tower. Just as he remembered, the top was covered by a lush, grassy garden, and he saw Fuko and the others in one corner.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting!” Haruyuki called out to the four who had arrived ahead of them as he halted his ascent and shifted to gliding. First, Takumu, dangling below, let go and landed with a thump on the lawn. Then, when Haruyuki just barely stuck his landing, Kuroyukihime and the others jumped down from his arms and chest, and offered their own words of thanks.

  His role as transport carrier completed without incident, Haruyuki let out a long breath and then abruptly realized Takumu had been excessively quiet during the flight. Maybe he’s no good with heights, he thought as he moved to look at his friend behind him, but Fuko’s voice interrupted him.

  “Everyone, welcome to my garden. This is the first time I’ve had so many guests. I hope we all fit inside the house.”

  Now that she mentioned it, Fuko’s house, where Haruyuki himself had once stayed—which had apparently been given the elegant name Fufuan—was not as big a structure as all that. Would nine people actually fit in there? Haruyuki had his gaze turned to the circular space of the garden, and then suddenly opened his eyes wide.

  In the center of the garden was a small pond. And in the center of the water, an elliptical shape shimmering blue on the water surface, shining orange as it reflected the evening sun—a portal. So far, this was all as he remembered. But the neat cottage with the green roof and white walls that should have been on the other side of the pond was not there, no matter how he strained his eyes.

  Haruyuki forgot Takumu’s strange silence and pointed to the east side of the garden. “Uh! Um! Master! Y-your house is— The house isn’t there!”

  “Hee-hee-hee.” Fuko, who had already taken off Gale Thruster and returned to her usual white dress form, laughed, the broad brim of her hat shaking. “It’s not as though it was blown away by a tornado or destroyed by a wolf. A locked player home doesn’t materialize unless the owner approaches it.”

  Deftly flicking through her Instruct menu, she turned a small item into an object. In her hand, shining with a silver light, was an old-fashioned key.

  Now that he thought about it, Haruyuki himself had feverishly searched for a key that had long been sleeping in a corner of the Unlimited Neutral Field a mere nine days ago in order to access a player home somewhere else. He had left it inside the main room, together with two high-level Enhanced Armaments, so no one would ever be able to find the house again.

  With a key of a different shape than the one Haruyuki had found, Fuko took a few steps toward the pond. When she did, the familiar white cottage appeared, wrapped in a hazy light.

  “Ooh!” Chiyuri and Niko cooed in awe.

  “Now please come this way.” Fuko turned around and beckoned them with a wave. “I’m sure I have some food left. Although, they might be a thousand years or so past their expiration dates.”

  4

  Suddenly, Haruyuki felt like he’d heard a faint sound. He opened his eyes a crack and saw the lone door being closed. Someone had left the room.

  Lifting his head slightly, he looked around. His comrades were scattered around on the floor of Fufuan, which was larger than he had remembered, all asleep for the time being. And naturally, all still duel avatars.

  Niko was using Pard, who was curled up like a cat, as a pillow. Lying on her side, Fuko was holding Utai tightly in her arms. Shuddering and flickering beside them was Akira, her flowing water armor rolled up in a ball. Takumu was asleep with his back against the wall, and Chiyuri had her arms and legs splayed out next to Haruyuki.

  But there was no one in the room’s only bed.

  The right to use the bed had been unanimously presented to the Black King, who looked like she would have trouble s
leeping on the floor, given her variously tapered form. Which meant it had been Kuroyukihime who had left the house seconds earlier. If they had been in the real world, he could have brushed this off with the question “Bathroom, maybe?” but in the Accelerated World, no matter how much you ate or drank, no such physical needs were generated.

  “…”

  After wrestling with his sleepiness for a few more seconds, Haruyuki slowly sat up. He stood, being careful not to make a sound, and then stealthily tiptoed across the wooden floor. When he touched the doorknob, the door opened outward, and he slipped through and closed it carefully. Perhaps the sound he’d heard before was the whisper of wind sneaking in during the door’s opening and closing.

  Outside the house, the world was still wrapped in the same vivid dusky light as when they’d arrived. When he checked the continuous dive time in his Instruct menu, it seemed that he’d been asleep for about five hours, but apparently, the Change had not come during that time.

  He made the menu disappear and looked around to find a silhouette sitting on the bench at the western edge of the tower’s outer circumference. From where Haruyuki was standing, it overlapped perfectly with the red evening sun floating on the horizon. The sharp form of the black silhouette was nothing less than heroic on the battlefield, but it now felt ephemeral for some reason, like art made of glass, and Haruyuki stared soundlessly in that direction for a while. The wind blew up again, causing faint ripples on the surface of the pond, and this spurred him to start walking.

  Perhaps she had already noticed that Haruyuki had been the one to come out of the house. “Sorry. Did I wake you?” Kuroyukihime asked quietly, once he’d gotten about two meters away from the bench.

  “…No, I slept plenty already.”

  Without a word, the young woman slid over to the right. Haruyuki took another five steps to come around to the front of the bench from the left, and then set himself down in the empty space. The garden in the sky dropped off close ahead, and there were no handrails or anything at the edge, so when he lifted his face, a spectacular view of the Accelerated World spread out before him. Not only could he see the central areas from Roppongi to Shibuya, but he could see the city beyond that, continuing out to Setagaya, Chofu, and Hachioji, and even farther out, where the mountains of Okutama were illuminated by the eternal twilight sun, burning red. He felt like his heart almost pulled into the scene.