The Black Dual Swordsman

by Reki Kawahara

  And then she saw it: a blue light glittering on the island far below her.

  A light she’d witnessed any number of times before—the flames of Gale Thruster, the sole Enhanced Armament in the Accelerated World for use in space.

  “Fuu,” Utai murmured nostalgically.

  A silhouette ascended at incredible speed from the island. It was none other than Strong Arm, Sky Raker, flying with her left arm tucked up alongside her body and her right fist thrust ahead of her.

  “So it’s come to thiiiiis!!” The falling Decurion thundered and brandished his Gladius. He was planning to strike at the rapidly approaching Raker.

  The sword was tinged with green sparks. Decurion looked for the right timing and called the technique name, “Viridius—”

  But the technique did not activate. Raker’s overwhelming speed would not even permit him to call out its second half.

  The vertical ascent of the comet that was Sky Raker slammed into Decurion. Raker’s fist pierced the hole that Utai’s special attack had opened up in his chest armor from the opposite side. His health gauge vanished instantly, and the second seat of the Six Armors broke into countless emerald fragments and exploded outward.

  Having landed the first win in this Battle Royale, Sky Raker did not pose victoriously, but rather continued to ascend and closed in on Utai.

  “Maiden!” she shouted, reaching out her hands to catch hold of Utai’s avatar and hug her to her chest.

  I was saved once again, Utai murmured in her heart, but she wasn’t upset about it. She felt like she’d done everything she could as a red long-distance type.

  “Fuu.” Utai said her name again and wrapped her arm about Fuko’s. Or she was about to, at least, when they were suddenly assaulted with a fierce sideways G, and she groaned sharply.

  Raker turned at a sharp angle and spoke to Utai with alarm in her voice. “Maiden, it’s not over yet!”

  “Wh-what happened?!”

  “We were hit…That whole watching-from-the-sidelines thing, that wasn’t about lenience. It was a strategy.”

  “What do you mean?” Utai asked.

  “Grandé!!” Raker shouted, forcing her boosters into overdrive as she flew straight toward the opposite side of the battlefield.

  In Brain Burst, players could control their avatars just as they did their real-life bodies, so naturally, your dominant arm in real life was the dominant arm of your avatar. Kuroyukihime, like the vast majority of Burst Linkers, was right-handed. Apparently, up until twenty or so years ago, some parents would correct their children if they were left-handed, but subsequent brain research found that forcibly correcting the dominant hand impeded development, so that sort of thing had since stopped.

  All of the members of the current Nega Nebulus were right-handed, but there had been a few southpaws in the old Legion. And just one member was ambidextrous. That had been the Anomaly, freely wielding two swords, Graphite Edge.

  And now, the Anomaly was not so much as taking a step, even as Kuroyukihime closed the distance between them with a full-powered dash. Lux in his right hand and Umbra in his left, his blades hung loosely at his sides; his gaze sat blocked by his dark goggles, so she couldn’t tell where he was looking.

  But this relaxed, natural state was itself Graph’s Way of the Flexible warm-up movement. He would absorb any and all attacks with minimal movement, reverse the vector, and beat his opponent back. There was even a story—almost a legend—about how in a fight with the first Red King, the Master Gunsmith, Red Rider, he had caught every single bullet fired from those two guns and sent them back to their owner.

  If Kuroyukihime slashed at him lazily, he would lightly brush the attempts aside and immediately deal her a painful counterattack. She first needed to make him pull out his double-sword cross guard, his most powerful defensive technique and one he only used when the Way of the Flexible couldn’t be applied.

  “Yaaaaah!!” She crossed the swords of her arms and raised them high. It was a special motion, but it wasn’t a special attack. Even if she slashed down with both arms at the same time, she wouldn’t be able to produce much more force than an attack with one arm. With Graph’s abilities, he wouldn’t have to use the Way of the Flexible; he could have simply guarded with one sword and countered with the other to do serious damage.

  But the Mode Blue effect light in Black Lotus’s arms dulled his instincts. No doubt judging that this was a new ability or special attack she had learned in the last three years, Graph brought his crossed swords above his head and took on a defensive posture.

  In their exchange back then, Kuroyukihime had lost, unable to break this cross guard. Now she feinted to break this absolute defensive technique, which was perhaps even on par with the Strife, the Green King’s Arc.

  “Hyaah!!” She launched her right leg in a forward kick with no warning. With both swords up, Graph’s sides were totally open, and the sharp tip of her sword dived in. If her aim was straight, she would no doubt plunge through to his back.

  “What—?!” Graph whirled the swords crossed in front of his face to his sides with an impossible speed.

  Shnnk! The tips of Lux and Umbra just barely stopped Kuroyukihime’s right leg, like a pair of scissors swinging down.

  The number of things in the Accelerated World that could be caught between Graphite Edge’s two swords—and not severed—could be counted on one hand. Kuroyukihime’s limbs were not on that list.

  Accompanied by her sharp and fleeting shriek, the sword of her right leg was cut off below the knee. Her health gauge dropped dramatically, plunging all at once to 50 percent.

  But she had expected all this.

  Kuroyukihime didn’t stop moving for a second, even with her right leg amputated. Instead, she wrapped both arms around Graphite Edge, including his swords.

  This technique was one she had not used on him before, and because his wrists had turned the dual swords inward, they had reached the limit of their range of motion. It would be impossible for him to immediately counter.

  Not letting the opportunity slip away, Kuroyukihime shouted, “Death By Embracing!!”

  Black Lotus’s level-eight special attack. The range: a mere seventy centimeters. But whatever her arms embraced was severed.

  An intense violet-blue light gushed from the Terminate Swords with Graph and his swords in their fatal grip.

  Kssshk! Her arms crossed, and Graphite Edge was cut in two.

  Or at least, he should have been.

  But instead of the usual sound of crystal shattering, she heard an abnormal metallic sound that rubbed her nerves the wrong way. Her closing arms had been stopped midway.

  As the light died down, Kuroyukihime opened her eye lenses wide. The swords of Black Lotus’s hands had dug halfway into the blades of Graph’s Lux and Umbra and then stopped. Pale sparks gushed from the place where smoky quartz and hyper diamond met, and she couldn’t tell which was cutting into which—or if they were both taking on the same amount of damage.

  “Nngh!” Kuroyukihime tried to open her arms to counter. But no matter how she pulled, her arms were not freed from Graph’s swords.

  “Ah, what the…?” Graph let out a dumbfounded cry as he also tried to pull his swords away, but the four blades, intertwined like a disentanglement puzzle, only creaked faintly.

  ““……””

  Former teacher and student stared at each other wordlessly.

  “This is an idiotic situation.” The first to break the silence was Kuroyukihime. “But if I simply hold you down here, it’s my victory. My comrades will take care of the rest of the fight.”

  “Looks like you’re bringing up some good young players, Lota,” Graph replied, the aura of a grin bleeding through. “But it’s about to be do-or-die, you know?”

  “What?” Kuroyukihime narrowed her eye lenses below her goggles and then immediately opened them wide.

  In the infinite starry sky unfolding behind Graph, a single shadow was flying in from the distance, emi
tting an overwhelming sense of pressure, extremely thick armor, and a cross-shaped shield equipped on his left arm. Invulnerable, Green Grandé.

  The Green King’s aim was not the central floating island where Kuroyukihime and Graph were fighting. It was the asteroid to the left where Silver Crow and the others were duking it out.

  Haruyuki!! Crying out in her heart, Kuroyukihime tried once more to swing her arms free. But the enmeshed swords didn’t so much as twitch, almost as if they had been welded together.

  In contrast, Graph fixed his swords in place as though he were actually trying to keep Kuroyukihime from moving. “Surely you didn’t think G was going to sit and watch right to the end, did you, Lota? That old man’s fighting style is to wait and wait and wait and wait until the moment. Always has been.”

  “Oh-ho, looking forward to this, then,” Kuroyukihime snapped, pushing back her panic.

  “Huh? But you can’t move, and even if you could, the rule is you can’t engage directly with G, yeah?”

  “Not me. We also have someone who decides when the moment comes,” Kuroyukihime replied, sending her thoughts out to the subordinate she trusted so deeply.

  I’m counting on you, Raker!

  This is when he decides to come at us?! Haruyuki was frozen in place, unable to figure out what to do, as he stared at the Green King closing in with ferocious speed.

  He’d been about to breathe a sigh of relief with the knowledge that the black team had somehow come out on top after they knocked Lignum Vitae and Ash Roller to the distant edge of the stage. And now he had this attack to worry about.

  And it wasn’t just that. The very fact of Grandé’s existence had completely slipped Haruyuki’s mind, and likely Chiyuri’s and Takumu’s as well. After creating that foothold for the green team at the start of the battle, Grandé had been silent, so Haruyuki had been convinced he was going to just stand and watch the rest of the fight play out.

  That had been the green team’s strategy: erase the presence of their king, their most powerful member. By tossing in this potent bomb to catch the black team totally off guard, they could wreak maximum havoc.

  Haruyuki could guess at the enemy’s objective, but that didn’t mean he thought up anything in the way of a counterstrategy. He simply stared at the approaching king.

  The first to recover from the shock-induced stupor was Takumu. “Push him back!” he growled, bracing against the biggest rock in the area to ready his Pile Driver.

  Takumu was right: Their best and last chance to attack the Green King was at that moment, when inertia was propelling him through the zero-gravity space. Even if he defended, the impact of their blows would still push him back into the distance.

  “Do it!” Haruyuki cried.

  “Go!” Chiyuri yelled.

  Takumu nodded, carefully set his aim, and called the name of the technique. “Lightning Cyan Spike!!”

  Cyan Pile’s level-four special attack turned the pile to plasma before launching it into the air at high speed. The jet of white-hot energy shone with a pale light and became a giant lance shooting forward.

  The Green King casually moved his great shield, the Strife, and the plasma lance hit the cross dead center before swelling outward into a sphere.

  Unsurprisingly, even a special attack couldn’t break through the Arc. But it should have at least been able to stop Grandé’s forward momentum. They would use that opportunity to think of some counterstrategy…

  “……What?!”

  Just when they’d started moving again, Haruyuki’s thoughts were interrupted once more.

  The plasma did not explode when it made contact with Grandé’s cross-shaped shield. It stayed in a sphere, shuddering, almost as if it were caught in some kind of field.

  An icy chill took hold of Haruyuki. He remembered what Kuroyukihime had once said to him: “The shield takes in any attack and counters with double the power.”

  “Pile! Run!!” Haruyuki shrieked.

  But he was too late.

  Zrssh! The plasma transformed back into a lance of light twice as thick as the original Lightning Spike and shot forward. The jet of pale energy traced the same trajectory back and plunged into Cyan Pile’s Pile Driver.

  “Nngh!” Takumu’s right arm from the shoulder down evaporated instantly, taking with it more than half the massive rock behind him.

  “Pile!” Chiyuri cried in dismay, leaping over to catch Takumu as he started to drift backward.

  “Bell, heal Pile!” Haruyuki shouted, then turned back to Grandé. Although the king had decelerated the slightest bit, he was still steadily approaching.

  He hadn’t remembered what he’d been taught about the special abilities of the Strife partially because Grandé’s sudden entry into the fray had dumbfounded him, and that was Haruyuki’s mistake. He could reflect on his mistakes all he wanted later, though. Right now, he had to get out of this tight spot.

  Once again, Kuroyukihime’s words echoed in his mind: “…The only way to break the defensive barrier of that shield is to get rid of it in a single super, superpowerful blow, or to create gaps through endless, successive attacks and aim for the main body of the avatar.”

  The former was impossible for Haruyuki. But the latter, maybe. After all, he was standing on this asteroid, so there was nowhere to run from Grandé.

  “Go!!” he chided himself, kicking off the rock behind him with all his might. Flying in a straight line in the zero-gravity environment, he clenched his right hand. Grandé’s massive body drew closer with every breath.

  “Unh…Aaaaaaaaaah!!” With a fierce cry, he pushed away the pressure field surrounding the king and threw his fist into the center of his shield.

  Wrist to shoulder, his joints creaked from the too-heavy feedback, as though he had punched the ground of Demon City. But if he stopped attacking now, he would only take the force of that punch times two. So he executed a left kick using the reactive force. Another right straight. And then a left hook. Punch. Kick. Punch. Kick.

  Every time he landed a blow, the silver glow on the emerald surface of the shield grew, most likely the accumulated energy of Haruyuki’s physical attacks. If his pace lagged for even a millisecond, this energy would double in size and bounce back to smash Silver Crow to pieces.

  It was weird that all his punching and kicking didn’t knock his avatar backward in the zero-gravity space, but he could feel some kind of strange magnetism. Judging from how Takumu’s plasma energy also accumulated on its surface, the Strife most likely generated a weak absorption field when defending.

  “Unh— Aaaaaaah!!” Haruyuki mustered up all his speed and rotated his striking techniques. If even a single blow missed the core of the shield, he would lose his balance and momentum, breaking the chain of physical strikes. He needed to keep going with maximum speed and maximum precision.

  Pushing his powers of concentration to the limit, Haruyuki remembered the time he had fought Grandé a month earlier. The place had been the roof of the Roppongi Hills Tower in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Equipped with the Armor of Catastrophe, Haruyuki had become the sixth Chrome Disaster and had swung his greatsword to strike the Strife.

  That had been what Kuroyukihime called the “single superpowerful blow.” And although he hadn’t been able to knock Grandé’s shield back with that blow, he hadn’t lost to the shield, either, and as a result, the force of reaction had been dispersed downward, completely destroying the top of the Hills Tower.

  Haruyuki currently did not have the force he possessed at that time. Back then, he’d been able to get a draw with Grandé thanks to the power produced by the Enhanced Armament the Chrome Disaster, the attack force of the cursed greatsword Star Caster, and the Beast, an artificial intelligence that lived in the armor. The difference in their actual abilities at present was essentially heaven and earth, but as long as Grandé kept taking his blows, Haruyuki would keep piling them on.

  The wave of hyper-acceleration that only visited him when his powers of concentrati
on crossed a certain line pushed up and enveloped him. All sound faded, and the color of his field of view changed. All that existed in the world were the cross-shaped shield before him and his own fists and feet.

  Faster. Faster.

  The interval between his strike shortened ever further, and the sound of successive impacts was like a machine gun firing nonstop. The accumulated silver energy grew and grew and grew until finally the shield itself began to shine.

  Faster, faster. Faster, faster, faster!!

  Haruyuki made his duel avatar dance, the interval between blows as short as humanly possible. As long as he was in this zone, he felt like he could keep going forever.

  Breaking this concentration was a shout from directly above. “That’s enough, Crow!”

  He knew who it was without looking. Suntan Chafer, sent flying to the boundary wall in the upper sky in the early stages of the Battle Royale, had returned. And she wasn’t alone.

  “I’m coming, Boss!” Iron Pound shouted.

  “I’m baaaaaack, baby!” Ash Roller cried gleefully.

  It seemed they had also returned from the distant edge of the stage.

  If all three green members got in his way, Haruyuki wouldn’t be able to keep pummeling the Green King. And the instant his fists stopped moving, the physical energy stored in that shield would be returned twofold. No matter how much of a metal color he was, Haruyuki would definitely be shattered into tiny pieces with that kind of impact.

  What am I going to do? What should I do?

  There’s no “should” here. Just keep going to the very last second!

  “Unaaaaaaaah!!” Mustering up every scrap of energy left to him, Haruyuki accelerated his onslaught even further. His hands and feet groaned, moving so fast he could only see them in freeze-frame, and the joints of his overloaded avatar were red-hot. He didn’t know how many blows he’d landed so far, but the Strife was a massive rock in his way, not so much as even twitching.