The Black Dual Swordsman

by Reki Kawahara

  When she walked over to the register terminal on the right edge of the counter, an accounting window popped up in her vision.

  The redheaded customer also glanced at the display stating that one tart was 430 yen, and then, after a moment’s thought, said, “Please add an iced milk tea.”

  “Very good.” Nodding, she added a drink set from the menu window. With the total now six hundred yen, the girl touched the confirmation button, and ka-ching! They heard a sound patterned after an old cash register.

  The register terminal on the counter could also accept cash—that is, physical money—but this feature was used perhaps once a month. In this era, for the majority of people, money had become nothing more than a number their Neurolinker displayed in their field of view. If you linked your e-money account with your bank account, it would even automatically recharge your balance.

  But Mihaya knew that the six hundred yen the redheaded girl paid for the tart and iced tea was money saved up from the meager allowance the school gave her. And that this Saturday afternoon teatime was basically the sole luxury she permitted herself.

  When the accounting window disappeared, Mihaya pushed back the ripples in her heart and said, “It will be just a moment, so please take a seat.”

  “Okay.” The redhead grinned and walked over to the eat-in area set up in a corner of the shop.

  Mihaya watched her small back for a second and then began to prepare the tea in the mini-kitchen on the opposite side of the register counter. In exchange for not being able to eat the labyrinth, she wanted her to at least enjoy a delicious cup of tea.

  When the clock had gone a little past three thirty, the waitress for the late shift took over, and Mihaya was done.

  Walking toward the door at the back of the shop with the sign that read STAFF ONLY, she glanced at the eat-in corner. The redheaded girl was racing her fingers across her virtual desktop at a table by the window, having long since finished the tart, but perhaps sensing Mihaya’s gaze, she lifted her face. Seeing Mihaya, she nodded lightly and picked her backpack up from the seat next to her.

  The waitresses at the counter didn’t so much as blink when the girl went through the door out into the back room with Mihaya. They’d been told the girl was from Mihaya’s old school (this was actually true), and Mihaya helped her study every Saturday evening.

  In the back, there was the office and a washroom, as well as a changing room for the staff, but Mihaya passed by these and walked right to the back. With only twenty-five minutes before four o’clock, she didn’t have the luxury of taking her time to change clothes. She unlocked the door in the far back and let the girl go in ahead of her.

  There was nothing but a low table and a sofa in the center of the nine-square-meter room. Back in the café days, this room had been used as a private party space, but Mihaya used the excuse that a cake shop had no need for that, so it had become dead space that she currently used for her own purposes.

  The instant the door was locked again, the redheaded girl cast aside the air of an honors student she’d projected up to that point and threw herself onto the sofa headfirst. Kicking and flailing her legs and feet in white socks, she groaned strangely, “Unnnnnh.”

  Mihaya’s mouth started to spread into a smile, and she pulled it back in before speaking. “If you’re that upset about it, you should’ve just eaten it.”

  “I’m not upset!” A childish shriek came back at her immediately. “Just changin’ my unfinished strawberry business into kinetic energy!”

  Eventually, she stretched out her legs with force and flopped onto her back, locking her hands behind her head. “And anyway, if I was upset, that’d be, like, you know…not nice to Chef Kaoru, since she made the cherry tart. That tart was super-tasty, too, after all.”

  “…It was.”

  The girl seemed to have intuited it from Mihaya’s reaction alone. She lifted her head slightly and stared with large eyes that looked green in the light. “Did you maybe make the labyrinth today, Pard?”

  Asked so directly, she couldn’t wiggle away. Careful not to change the expression on her face, she replied briefly, “Just the deco. Chef made the cake.”

  “…You did…Sorry for giving it away.” The girl sat up and started to bow her head.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Mihaya offered quickly. “In fact, I have to thank you. If you hadn’t given the cake up, Rain, I’m sure those kids would’ve cried.”

  “Crying makes kids stronger. Or that’s what Chef Kaoru would say, I guess.”

  This time, Mihaya did smile a little at the reply and announced crisply, “From now on, I’ll be finishing all the labyrinths on Saturdays.”

  “Oh! Then I’m excited for next week.” Grinning, the girl shook her red pigtails once before recomposing herself. “’Kay then. Better get this Territories strategy meeting started. I guess Helix’s attacking today, so we let out guard down, and they’ll eat us up.”

  “K.” Mihaya answered briefly and took a deep breath to switch mental gears. From a cake shop waitress to the Submaster of the Legion Prominence, Blood Leopard.

  She sat on the sofa and pulled XSB cables out from the home router installed in the back of the table. Because this strategy room was shielded against electromagnetic waves, they couldn’t connect to the global net without a wired connection.

  She inserted the plug into her Neurolinker, and the girl did the same thing on the other side of the table. And then the leader of Prominence, the Red King, Scarlet Rain, the one and only Yuniko Kozuki, raised two fingers of her right hand. Not a peace sign, but a signal for the start of the countdown.

  “Two, one.”

  In time with the brief words, Mihaya chanted the magic command she had been taught four years earlier.

  “Burst Link.”

  3

  The full-dive-type fighting-network game, Brain Burst 2039. This was the new world her cousin Akira had given Mihaya.

  It wasn’t as though she’d liked full dive games when she was a kid. She’d basically only played motorcycle racing games with her father sometimes. So when Akira had first explained the concept of the BB program, it didn’t actually click for her. She even wondered why anyone would get so worked up about a violent fighting game that they’d accelerate their thoughts.

  But that diffidence vanished the instant she first set foot in the Accelerated World. Her duel opponent was, of course, her parent Akira—her name as a Burst Linker was Aqua Current—and the stage attribute was Primeval Forest. Even though the terrain remained the familiar Sakuradai in Nerima where she lived, the concrete and asphalt were completely gone, and in their place were massive knotty trees and strangely shaped rocks, green grasses, and a perfectly blue sky that continued as far as she could see.

  The overwhelming detail of everything there, every blade of grass, every stone, was completely different from the VR games Mihaya had known up to that point. The gentle breeze held the scent of forests, and the sunlight caught particles in the air and made them glint and glitter. The vast amount of information vividly stimulating all five of her senses could even have been said to be greater than that of the real world.

  It wasn’t just the external world that had been entirely transformed. Mihaya herself had changed into something not human, just like Akira. Her whole body was wrapped in crimson semitransparent armor that felt like neither plastic nor glass, long retractable claws grew from her hands and feet, and she had the head of a leopard with sharp fangs.

  After checking her own image out, Mihaya felt a powerful urge ahead of any confusion. She wanted release—she wanted to set free all the things she’d been pushing back in her heart all this time, ever since she learned the name of her father’s illness.

  Mihaya ran. She kicked at the ground of the Primeval Forest stage with all the might her leopard’s paws possessed and flew. From one area boundary to the other, she ran at a speed that surpassed even the wind. And as she ran, she wept. She cried for her big, reliable, gentle father.r />
  Her tears finally dried up when there were ten minutes left in the thirty-minute duel. Returning to her starting point, Mihaya silently faced Akira, who had been waiting patiently.

  Her cousin also had a form that resembled her real-world self. Akira’s avatar, surprisingly slender limbs wrapped in a membrane of water that continuously flowed from top to bottom, was more singular than Mihaya’s leopard-person avatar while still being reminiscent somehow of the girl in the real world.

  Mihaya stared at Akira’s pale eyes, flickering beyond the streaming water, and asked just one question.

  Will I be able to run even faster?

  The answer was very simple.

  If you get stronger.

  Gazing down on the Primeval Forest stage below her, the same as that day four years earlier, Mihaya waited for the battle to start.

  The stage itself was the same, but this was not a normal duel. It was the Territories that were held every Saturday evening, so the focus was less on individual battle abilities than on the coordination of the team. She couldn’t go into a full-speed dash with enough force to push through the blazing characters FIGHT like she normally did. Still, Mihaya’s strategy in the Territories was simple: immediately identify an enemy’s critical point and bite into it as hard as she could.

  Transformed into a crimson leopard-person, Mihaya was camped out at the top of the highest tree on the western side of the stage. Visibility was poor because of the massive trees and the branches and leaves extending out in a broad circle, along with the fog that occasionally formed, but the sharp eyes of a leopard didn’t miss the faintest of reflections of light below the trees. And there were basically no large objects to hide behind in the belt of grasslands cutting diagonally across the center of the stage—Kanpachi Street in the real world.

  As she sent her eyes racing intently across the world below from the treetop 250 meters in the air, she heard an impatient voice from a branch just below.

  “Paaaard, let’s just go and make the hit ourseeeelves,” said an F-type avatar with a slender form. Her name was Mustard Salticid.

  Her color name, Mustard, was easily remembered thanks to the prompt provided by the mustard-colored armor covering her body, but nearly every Burst Linker who met her had to ask about her proper name two or three times, and then ask again the next time they met her. It was also an English word Mihaya hadn’t known, but apparently salticid meant jumping spider. And true to her name, Salticid had eight round eyes on her head, lined up in a row. Naturally, the surface area of her face mask couldn’t contain them, so the eyes on the end reached the back of her head.

  Thus, her field of view was unusually wide—although, apparently, the sensation of being able to see behind you even while facing forward took some getting used to—and her ability to detect enemies was in the top three even in the Legion. Her powers of concentration, however, needed a little more work, and she was already bored of searching, even though it hadn’t been five minutes yet since the start of the Territories.

  “Not yet. After we find the other enemy squad.” Mihaya continued to scan the forest in the distance.

  The Territories were a team battle with a minimum of three on three. The Red Legion, Prominence, currently had thirty-three members, so they would split up into teams of eight to simultaneously defend the four areas of Nerima. However, this was the ideal. Given that Burst Linkers were, in principle, K–12 students, they weren’t necessarily always free on Saturday evening. The policy of Prominence Legion Master Scarlet Rain was that if members had something to take care of in the real, they could prioritize that, so the number of people taking part each week averaged thirty. And that day—June 29, 2047—three people had canceled unexpectedly, so there had been only twenty-five people at the pre-battle meeting. Split into four teams, they were six, six, six, and seven.

  Of course, they’d anticipated areas where the fighting would be fiercest, and it wouldn’t have been impossible to throw ten or more people in there, but no prediction was absolute. The leader of Helix, the midsize Legion from Itabashi that had been coming to attack Nerima every week this last month, had a pretty good head on his shoulders, so it was difficult to gamble on an attack area.

  Thus, an even number of defending personnel were assigned to Nerima Areas Nos. 1–4, with the leader for Area No. 1 being the Red King herself; while Area No. 2 would be guided by Blood Leopard, the head of the executive group Triplex; and Areas Nos. 3 and 4, the other two members of the Triplex, Cassis Mousse and Thistle Porcupine, would spread out their defensive power in all directions. And Mihaya’s team had gotten Helix.

  Since the number of people on the attacking side matched that on the defending side, they were six enemies and six allies. Given their numbers, they would split up into two groups or, at worst, three. Mihaya had the four with the greatest battle power go on ahead to occupy the central base, while she and Mustard tried to suss out the enemy’s movements with their sharp eyes.

  Helix had also apparently split into two groups, and she had already spotted the four that were likely the main force. Just like their own main force, they were heading straight for the central base—also known as the stronghold—so they likely weren’t even trying to hide. The problem was the other two members. If she didn’t sniff them out, their own main force could get caught in a pincer attack and be wiped out.

  She heard a lazy voice from below once again. “Buuut if we crush the enemy main force with a pincer attack first, then all we have to do is hide in the stronghold, and we win, riiight?”

  “It’s not hide. It’s dig in,” she retorted, but Salticid did make a certain amount of sense. A great number of the Burst Linkers who belonged to Prominence did indeed have superior red-type—i.e., long-distance—fighting abilities, just as one would expect from the Red Legion, so having everyone charge their special-attack gauges and dig into the stronghold to turn it into a contest of firepower was one strategy for victory.

  But naturally, there were risks. The stronghold itself had no defensive powers, so when they used the digging-in strategy, she wanted to have at least two shield avatars with defensive abilities. The breakdown of the four in the main force Mihaya had sent ahead had a good balance with two red, one blue, and one green, but she was somewhat uneasy about them defending the base from all directions.

  And the Helix Legion Master was on the enemy team. Thanks to his sharp strategizing, Helix stood out from the rest of the midsize Legions, and there was no way he hadn’t readied some countermeasures to the firepower encampment technique that was Promi’s best party trick.

  And then the enemy’s main force stopped their run through the forest on the east side.

  The tall tree where Mihaya and Salticid sat was the large chimney of a cleaning factory in Higarigaoka, Nerima, in the real world. As the crow flies, it was over two kilometers to the intersection of Kanpachi Street and Expressway 441, where the central stronghold was located.

  At this distance, even her leopard eyes could just barely make out the number of enemies. As Mihaya continued to seek out the other enemy group, she sent a question down to the branch below. “Cid, can you identify the four enemies beyond the base?”

  “Mm, hang on,” Salticid replied, stretching her neck out almost as if she were trying to get even a little closer. A few seconds later, the answer came back to Mihaya, with a briskness that was utterly different from her demeanor up to that point. “Big green one in the lead. Pretty sure it’s Verdant Colossus. Big brown one in the back; that’s Cinnamon Raccoon. And the purple midsize is Azalea Baton…maybe. And then a small yellow in the rear. Never seen ’em before, but it’s probably Rutile Check.”

  “………!”

  Mihaya inhaled sharply, and Salticid came to the same realization.

  “Whoa, whoa! So then, that means the leader Berry’s not there! So those four aren’t the main force?!”

  Of course, it wasn’t a rule or anything that the team leader always led the main squad. Mihaya herself, the
leader of the Promi team, had stayed behind to search for the enemy, after all.

  But of the six people on the Helix team, the Legion Master Beryllium Coil had conspicuously more direct attack power. If he thought he could overtake the central base with a squad without him on it and essentially composed of defensive colors on top of that, he was gravely underestimating Prominence, one of the six great Legions.

  No, I can’t believe that someone as sharp as Beryllium would put together such a slapdash strategy. In which case, were he and the other avatar—by the process of elimination, the red-type Chili Powder—planning to ambush the Prominence party from behind and wipe them out?

  But even if they were, those two avatars still had to cross the grasslands of Kanpachi Street. The Promi party was currently moving forward and would reach the central base within the next two minutes. There was not enough time for Coil to come around from the rear, and if they approached from either side of the wide road, they would be totally exposed to the Promi team, ensuring that their health gauges were eaten away by long-distance attacks before they could make contact. There would have been no point in splitting into teams.

  “Did we miss their crossing?” Mihaya murmured.

  “No waaay!” Salticid rejected the idea immediately. “Nobody could sneak across Kanpachi right under our eyes!”

  Mihaya nodded; it was true. It was possible to break across the grassy belt using a hiding technique of some kind, but neither the leader nor Chili Powder, accompanying him, had any such technique. Or so she thought.

  The reason she couldn’t say for sure was because duel avatars grew. They obtained abilities, special attacks, and Enhanced Armament through their level-up bonuses. Although she could only run four years earlier, Mihaya, too, had gained a number of powers now that she was at level six.

  However, there were limits, too. As a general rule, it was not possible to obtain abilities that diverged significantly from the avatar’s color affiliation. Beryllium was a close-range metal color, and Chili was long-distance. Neither was the type to awaken a hiding ability so powerful it could deceive the visual acuity of both Mihaya and Salticid.