The Black Dual Swordsman

by Reki Kawahara

  Two of these green soldiers headed for Raker, the other two, Current, while Decurion, back on the floating island, lance in hand, kicked wordlessly off the ground and charged toward Utai.

  On the left, the powerful shock wave of incoming missiles. On the right, the heroic footfalls of Legionnaires. Kuroyukihime keenly felt the struggle of her comrades. But she didn’t have the freedom to concern herself with that now.

  Her right hand’s sword tip was gone, so she could no longer execute thrusting attacks. The swordsman who had dealt this damage still had not drawn his second sword and remained casually cool up against her.

  Black Lotus, however, was reeling from the shock of the M-type avatar catching her Death By Piercing, a special attack that had pierced countless powerful enemies up to that point. It had indeed been Graph who had taught her the Way of the Flexible, or as Silver Crow put it, Guard Reversal, but rendering a piercing special attack powerless with one hand was a total aberration.

  “Don’t look so serious, Lota,” Graph drawled, seeing through to Kuroyukihime’s heart. “It’s only because gravity’s so weak that I could stop your DBP without taking damage. It’s like your avatar’s made of Styrofoam, basically.”

  “Don’t abbreviate my technique name,” she replied curtly, trying to switch mental gears. Just as he said, if there was no gravity, then her body would also be lighter, and the force of her attack would no longer be completely transmitted. So then, why had he been able to cut her sword? Because he’d fixed in place the tip of her sword with the hand that caught her special attack.

  The key to close-range combat in the Space stage was to fix yourself firmly on something with mass. She had thought that had been what she was doing, but it wasn’t enough. If she didn’t also fix her opponent in place, she wouldn’t be able to have any impact on a master player like Graph.

  But given that all her limbs were swords, Black Lotus couldn’t use any grabbing techniques. She could have one of her comrades grab hold of him for her, but mentally, that would be the same as defeat. If she was going to cut Graph down using her own power, then there was only one option. He had probably already read her mind on that one, too, though. If she aimed blindly, she would just be hit with a painful counterattack. She needed to carefully lay out a strategy that led to that checkmate.

  You were always good at this, Haruyuki, she spoke to her scion in her heart, and the pressure eased just the slightest bit.

  It was true: She couldn’t lose this mock Territory battle. If they didn’t win and get Shibuya back, the decisive battle with the White King would fade into the distance. During that time, Cosmos would use her latest Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, to wreak some new havoc on the Accelerated World.

  What on earth did this girl, her real-life sister, want? What was she fighting for? Kuroyukihime still didn’t know. But as Kuroyukihime’s parent, she had given her Brain Burst. She had manipulated Kuroyukihime with false information and made her drive Red Rider to total point loss. Behind the scenes, against the backdrop of the mutual nonaggression pact among the six major Legions, she had formed the Acceleration Research Society and brought about a number of chaotic situations using backdoor programs, remote farming, and the ISS kits. She had abducted Niko and created the Mark II. All these were the process to realize some single objective.

  Kuroyukihime would find out what this hidden objective was when she defeated White Cosmos and forced her to talk at sword point. She couldn’t lose to Graph there. But Haruyuki Arita had taught her that just seeing the objective ahead didn’t make a battle worth fighting. She needed to muster her full power in this duel.

  …And have fun.

  “That’s right, Haruyuki,” Kuroyukihime murmured the thought to Silver Crow, fighting hard in the battlefield to the left, before taking a deep breath and letting it out.

  “Overdrive. Mode Blue.” She voiced the command almost in a whisper, and a blue light rose up in the grooves along her body. She abandoned armor strength and technique range to specialize her avatar in close-combat attacks.

  Graph’s aura also changed the instant he saw her transformation. More precisely, anything like an aura disappeared completely, and any sense of his internal being was gone. The swordsman moved his left arm languidly, and he had no sooner grabbed the hilt of Umbra above his shoulder than he had smoothly drawn it.

  Crouching, Kuroyukihime squared off against the Anomaly, now finally equipped with both swords. She had 80 percent left in her health gauge, while Graph’s was practically full. As for their special-attack gauges, Kuroyukihime was at 60 percent, while Graph was at 70. Both of his gauges were greater than hers, but at this level, they could flip back and forth any number of times; that was the Brain Burst duel.

  Kuroyukihime readied the sword of her broken right hand to the front and her intact left to the rear. Graph mirrored her, taking on the same stance. The rapidly increasing pressure was on the verge of cracking the earth at her feet, but she accepted even that.

  Enjoy—no, delight. I never thought I would get the chance to cross swords with this master again, and now here we are facing each other. I’ll show him how far I’ve come. I’ll show him the power I refined while we were apart.

  Beneath her goggles, Kuroyukihime smiled unconsciously. Sound disappeared, pressure disappeared, fear disappeared. In that moment, Kuroyukihime moved.

  The six large missiles, an impossible triple launch of Howling Panhead, closed in on Haruyuki and his friends, seeker lenses glittering violently.

  “Nngh! One more time!” Takumu threw his upper body back again and moved to trigger his special attack, but Haruyuki hurried to stop him.

  “Wait, Pile. It probably won’t be enough!”

  The previous Splash Stinger had just barely managed to take down the previous two large missiles. With the late start, it would be impossible for Takumu to make all six of the missiles flying toward them explode. And as long as he was hooked up to Lignum Vitae, Ash Roller could simply launch more, as many as he wanted.

  What were those missiles using to lock onto Haruyuki and his friends anyway? It wasn’t heat. Duel avatars had no body temperature, and if that was their homing device, the rear missile would lock onto the missile before it.

  Was it simply that they locked onto an “enemy avatar”? No, that might have been possible during the Territories or a tag-team match, but the rules of this duel followed Battle Royale. System-wise, everyone except yourself was an enemy, so the missiles would attack Lignum.

  At the very least, the fact that they had lenses meant they had to be looking at something. Not infrared light, but visible light images. And if they were identifying enemies and allies, then an external guidance? Which meant…Ash Roller’s gaze!

  Haruyuki yanked his head up and locked eyes with the skull rider staring at them from the edge of the floating island.

  There was no mistake.

  Which meant he just had to make sure that gaze didn’t reach them. “Pile! The ground!”

  With just these words, Takumu seemed to guess at Haruyuki’s intent. They would be leaving it to chance, but there was no longer any other way. Takumu nodded and turned the Pile Driver of his right hand toward his feet, shouting, “Spiral Gravity Driver!!”

  The enlarged Enhanced Armament shot a high-speed spinning hammer drill slamming into the concrete. This technique had the restraint that it could only be fired perpendicular to the stage, but it had enough force to destroy even Octahedreal Isolation, the imprisoning space Black Vise generated. And because of the flames that jetted from the rear of the Pile Driver, Takumu wouldn’t float away after using it.

  The steel-hammer drill plunged deep into the floating island, and the left half on which Haruyuki and his comrades stood broke into countless fragments and shattered. The local gravity disappeared completely, and the lumps of concrete drifted aimlessly.

  “Aaah!” Chiyuri shrieked, and Haruyuki grabbed her hand.

  The missiles were speeding toward them, but Ash Roller’s
gaze was blocked by countless obstacles, and one after another, they crashed into the concrete and exploded.

  “Nngh!” Haruyuki tried to figure out their next move as he shielded Chiyuri from the heat and small fragments pressing in on them.

  Still in tree mode, Lignum Vitae had her feet caught in a chunk of stone three meters across, so she couldn’t move and instead elected to continue photosynthesis. Ash clung to this rocky lump, cursing violently, but it seemed that his special-attack gauge was still being charged. They’d be targeted by his missiles once again if they flew carelessly out of the asteroid belt. But if they stayed hidden forever, Suntan Chafer might come back after Haruyuki had gone to all the trouble of sending her flying off to the end of the sky.

  “Taku, Chiyu.” Haruyuki leaned in toward his childhood friends behind a large lump of concrete and communicated the strategy quietly.

  They seemed a bit hesitant, but they trusted him implicitly and nodded their agreement before taking position as Haruyuki had instructed. The three nodded at one another once more before Haruyuki kicked at a nearby rock and came out from behind the obstructing curtain.

  “Go!” he shouted the instant he caught sight of Ash.

  Takumu, directly behind him, fired his Pile Driver, and Haruyuki caught the launched pile with the sole of his right foot. Using the Way of the Flexible, he bent his leg and turned the attack power into propulsive force.

  However, unable to completely absorb the force of the pile in the zero-gravity environment, he felt the armor on the bottom of his foot crack. But it didn’t go so far as to penetrate, and Silver Crow became a silver bullet, charging through space.

  “Giga-fooooooool!! A banzai attack like that’ll never defeat mighty me now that I’m infinityyyyyy!!” Ash Roller cried, still clinging to the rock up ahead. He snapped the fingers of his left hand out at Haruyuki, about to fire his missiles again.

  “Citron Calllllllll!!” Chiyuri shouted, and a beam of yellow-green light gushed up from behind Haruyuki to envelop Ash’s entire body.

  “Whoa!” Ash howled as his special-attack gauge dropped before his eyes. His once-fully-charged gauge was being reversed by Lime Bell’s Citron Call Mode I, which wound back the status of the target avatar in increments of seconds.

  “H-H-Howling Panhead!!” Ash frantically shouted the technique name, but his gauge had already dropped below the required amount, and the motorcycle, on standby off in the distance, didn’t so much as sigh. Of course, once Chiyuri’s special attack ended, the gauge would be filled up once again by Lignum’s ability, but as long as it bought Haruyuki a few seconds to get closer, it was enough.

  “Hngaaaaaaaah!” Haruyuki beat down on Ash’s chest with a flying cross chop. The kinetic energy generated by Cyan Pile’s Pile Driver was transmitted as if the two avatars were billiard balls, and the larger one—Ash—shrieked.

  “I’ll be baaaaaaack!” And he flew off into the distant darkness.

  “No need to hurry!” Haruyuki called in his mind, grabbing onto the rock Ash had been clinging to only a second earlier. He’d anticipated this, but the line of light that spilled from Lignum also poured into Haruyuki’s body and started to replenish his health gauge.

  After a few seconds, Lignum appeared to notice the energy thief. “Krebs Cycle!” she shouted, an attempt to cancel tree mode. The conical canopy became a parasol again, and the trunk took on the lines of a girl once more.

  Perhaps if he was the hero in an anime or a manga or a Burst Linker who followed the way of the gentleman, he would have made a vow not to attack an enemy in the middle of transforming. But Haruyuki, still just level six, didn’t have that luxury against a high ranker.

  “……!”

  Not wasting any time, he kicked off the stone. Aiming for the instant that the tree roots of Lignum’s feet turned back into slender heels, he quickly used up the special-attack gauge he had stolen. “Head Buuuuuutt!!”

  Lignum, hands still holding the parasol high above her head, was unable to get her guard up in time and took Haruyuki’s Head Butt to the chest. But even if she had guarded, the result would have been the same.

  “I will be back.” The fourth seat of the Six Armors flew off in a different direction from Ash.

  Haruyuki immediately looked up at the sky, but he still saw no sign of Suntan.

  And with that, the three opponents Kuroyukihime had instructed them to engage were dispatched for the time being. If they could add their strength to the other battlefields in the time they’d bought, the fight would tilt heavily in Nega Nebulus’s favor.

  “Kuroyukihime!” Haruyuki stared hard at the floating island where Kuroyukihime and Graphite Edge were waging war.

  An intense chill shot up his spine. Anticipation. Fear. Dread…

  The certainty that he’d made an oversight he could never make up for.

  On top of the three meters of rock, he looked back as if compelled and saw a cross-shaped silhouette approaching rapidly, pulling at him like a massive planet.

  “Maiden!” Fuko cried in dread.

  Back in the old Legion days, Utai would fly into the enemy camp in Fuko’s arms and be dropped onto the enemy base like a bomb. But thinking about it now, she couldn’t remember ever dying because of this strategy. After Utai burned the area to the ground with her ranged techniques, Fuko always swept in to protect her from the enemy counterattack.

  In the present moment as well, Fuko was moving to protect her from Decurion’s powerful attack. Utai could see her turning her back to the two Legionnaires marching her way, aiming instead for her directly.

  But Utai couldn’t let Fuko spoil her forever. If she couldn’t stand tall and call herself the fire of the Four Elements eventually, she’d never be able to move forward.

  “I’m okay!!” she called, mustering up all her willpower and drawing her longbow.

  There was no way the long-distance-type Ardor Maiden could win in hand-to-hand combat against the close-range Viridian Decurion, so before he got close enough to swing his sword, she needed to check him in his place. All she had to rely on was the special attack that had pushed back Iron Pound, Superluminal Stroke. Sink or swim, she would aim for the avatar’s critical point.

  Except…that wouldn’t work.

  There was no way a sink-or-swim approach would work on a high-ranking opponent. However, at a time like this, she imagined Silver Crow would certainly not give in to despair, but rather try to find a way out.

  Swallowing her fear, Utai drew Decurion in as far as she could. Just when Gladius was within striking distance, she bent her knees deeply and kicked off the ground with everything she had.

  “Yaah!” Her lightweight avatar pulled away from the gravity of the floating island in the blink of an eye, and she ascended toward the starry sky.

  “You’re not getting away!” Decurion shouted, jumping after her—until he groaned, suddenly understanding his error.

  They flew essentially straight up, a mere four meters between them.

  Decurion couldn’t approach Utai as long as inertia propelled them forward. He couldn’t even change his trajectory to return to the floating island.

  Most likely, if Utai had jumped even a second earlier, Decurion would have guessed at her aim. But because he’d already dropped into his slashing posture, he’d matched her rhythm.

  Decurion probably also had a special attack of the type that could generate kinetic energy. But he’d only just generated the four Legionnaires, so his gauge had to be empty. She needed to take this chance to deal as much damage as possible.

  As she moved toward the brilliantly colored stars, Utai drew her longbow. Naturally, Decurion moved his buckler to try to defend. But it was impossible to cover his entire body with a shield only forty centimeters across—and there were only four meters between them.

  Fwng! Her arrow plunged deep into the gap in the armor covering Decurion’s right foot. The drop in his health gauge was about 5 percent, but the direct hit to an extremity gave Decurion angular mo
mentum, and he started to spin on the perpendicular. Newton’s third law of motion ensured that Utai was also pushed backward when she fired the arrow, and the pair pulled away from each other bit by bit.

  “Nngh!” Decurion moved his limbs, seemingly in a panic, but stopping the spinning once it had started was not possible in space. He soon gave up and curled into a ball, trying to protect himself by covering his body as much as possible with the round shield, but his back was virtually defenseless.

  Taking a deep breath, Utai drew her bowstring once more. Carefully applying the right amount of pressure, she focused on one spot and fired.

  Snap! The arrow pierced the long armor plate stretching down from Decurion’s chest. There was no avatar body beneath, so this didn’t bring about any extra damage, but Utai had her eye on something else. With the addition of spin in the opposite direction, Decurion’s vertical rotation stopped just as his back was turned toward Utai.

  “Heeaaaaaah!!” With an unusually fierce battle cry, Utai made the string of her beloved bow sing. The arrows launched in succession half a second apart and pierced Decurion’s back one after the other.

  “Hnngaaaah!!” Decurion tucked in his arms in an attempt to turn his body around, but he had nothing that could defend against the onslaught of Utai’s arrows. They turned the thin armor of his back into a pincushion in the blink of an eye, and Decurion’s health gauge dropped rapidly while both of their special-attack gauges increased dramatically.

  The instant hers moved above 50 percent, Utai pulled her bowstring back with extra force and shouted, “Superluminal Stroke!!”

  White light flashed between her hands. Her unhesitating arrow shone so brightly that it made the stars themselves seem dull.

  Shpak! By the time the sound of impact reached her ears, the arrow of light had already pierced Decurion’s back. Just as with Pound, it didn’t fell him in one blow, but his health gauge was colored bright red, and he dropped toward the floating island, arms and legs splayed. Meanwhile, hit with unprecedented recoil, Utai was pushed up toward the infinite sky. With this momentum, she wouldn’t be able to return until she hit the wall of the stage. She would have to leave the rest to Fuko and Akira.