Accel World Vol. 21: The Snow Sprite Read online

But the crushing noise was relentless. Two blue lights near the outer edge. Cyan Pile and Aqua Current. Gray and reddish-purple in the center. Ash Roller and Magenta Scissor.

  “They—!” Haruyuki groaned, hovering some distance away from the ice wall.

  “Servant!” Metatron yelled again from his shoulder. “There!”

  He hurriedly shifted his gaze. Someone had leapt down from the roof of a building on the west side of the battleground and was now approaching in several large jumps.

  “Nngh…” He couldn’t fight here. He spread the wings on his back and started to fly toward Shinagawa Station, which would have been to the southwest.

  The sounds of not only his Oscillatory pursuer but also the avatars being swallowed up by the tornado chased after him. As he flew with everything he had, he counted them with every heartbeat.

  Ten, eleven, twelve. For some reason, even though he couldn’t see the effect color, Haruyuki could tell which sound was whose death. Cassis Moose, Thistle Porcupine, Ardor Maiden.

  Thirteen. Blood Leopard.

  And fourteen. Sky Raker.

  “It can’t be…,” Haruyuki said in a faint voice, tears welling up in the eye lenses beneath his goggles.

  No matter how specialized in destruction Snow Fairy’s Incarnate technique was or how impossible Ivory Tower’s Incarnate technique made it to use Incarnate techniques, he simply couldn’t believe that even the veteran high ranker Elements and Triplex could be killed instantly in a single blow. And now that he was thinking about it, this was the first time he’d come face-to-face with a scenario in which Fuko, Utai, and Akira fell.

  It can’t be, he was about to say once more when the fifteenth sound of destruction reached his ear. Swallowing his breath, he did a recount of his comrades in the back of his mind.

  Sixteen people had been trapped in the prison of ice, basically the entire attacking team. Haruyuki and Chiyuri had escaped, leaving fourteen in the prison. In which case, the fifteenth sound of death he’d just heard…

  Of course. Ivory Tower. To prevent Nega Nebulus from escaping from the Last Glacial Period, he’d snuck up right next to them and canceled their Incarnate techniques. And then he’d gotten caught up in Brinicle and died.

  Fairy’s Incarnate technique was terrifyingly, overwhelmingly powerful. But what was even more terrifying was that the White Legion were so serious that they didn’t balk at sacrificing one of their own, effectively the number two of their Legion. They were intent on killing Nega Nebulus’s main force and banishing them forever from the Accelerated World.

  “Our friends…!” Chiyuri cried out, face pressed up against Haruyuki’s chest. He tried to find something to say to the childhood friend he’d just barely managed to save, but before he could, Metatron’s voice came in warning once more.

  “Servant, you’re being pursued!”

  “What?!”

  Looking over his shoulder, he did indeed see a single black shadow leaping from rooftop to rooftop, chasing after them at basically Haruyuki’s speed. That was some serious jumping power, but it was less than five hundred meters now to the Shinagawa Station. If he just kept on flying and dived into the portal, he could evade the danger for the time being. Once Haruyuki and Chiyuri woke up inside the bus running along Meiji-dori Street in the real world, they could remove the Neurolinkers from the necks of Fuko and the others, and all their avatars would vanish from the Unlimited Neutral Field, thereby escaping the threat of Unlimited PK.

  The Oscillatory side also had to have known that, which was why they tried to capture them, so that none of the members of Nega Nebulus would escape. And that was why they’d sent someone after Haruyuki. But he couldn’t let himself be caught. He absolutely had to reach the portal and save his friends.

  “Aaaah!” Prepared to use up everything that was left in his health gauge, Haruyuki increased the frequency of the vibration of his wings.

  Ahead, the multipurpose super-skyscraper at Shinagawa Station, built with the redevelopment of 2020, rose up darkly into the sky. The portal was inside the entrance on the first floor. Because he was carrying Lime Bell, he couldn’t hit his normal maximum speed, but at this pace, they would reach the portal while maintaining the distance from their pursuer.

  Haruyuki tried to knock his speed up to the next level in order to pull through the remaining three hundred meters.

  However.

  “Crow…That—!!” He heard Metatron’s voice once more, this time even more tense than before.

  And then Haruyuki saw it, too. An enormous black shadow with organic curves crouching in the rotary in front of the station building.

  The shadow writhed ponderously, perhaps sensing the approach of Haruyuki and his friends. Several heads stretched up at length from the short, stout torso, and countless red eyes glittered. Given its height of some ten meters or more, there was no doubt it was Beast level or higher.

  “That is a Hydra-type high-level Being! This is not an opponent you can defeat!” Normally, Metatron would try to make him attack no matter how powerful the enemy, but she checked him fiercely now. However, if they didn’t enter that Enemy’s aggro range, they couldn’t reach the portal at Shinagawa Station.

  “Dammit! Why?!” Haruyuki gritted his teeth at the question of why now, of all times, at this critical juncture, a Super-class Enemy was camped out right in front of the portal, before gasping sharply.

  It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Through some means, the White Legion had lured that Enemy to the portal and fixed it there—to prevent the members of Nega Nebulus from leaving the Unlimited Neutral Field. Just like the Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron had been forcibly moved from the Shiba Park Underground Labyrinth to Tokyo Midtown.

  When he looked even more closely, he saw a silver crown with sharp thorns biting into the center of the Enemy’s head. He had no doubt it was the same as the silver circlet that had once restrained Metatron.

  “They would go that far!” Groaning quietly, he spread his wings to decelerate, left with no other choice. There were other portals in the area besides the one at Shinagawa Station, but for all that, they likely had Super-class Enemies placed at each of them. He didn’t have much left in his special-attack gauge, either; he would have to descend and recharge it.

  After a glance back, Haruyuki landed on the roof of a large hotel some distance from the station. Their pursuer was probably still on the trail, but he couldn’t imagine that whoever it was could climb the iron walls without handholds. He set Lime Bell on her feet.

  “Chiyu, you okay?”

  “Yeah…I’m fine. No damage.” Chiyuri answered bravely, but then she quickly lowered her face. “But…Everyone else…All of them…”

  Haruyuki silently patted her back. Even through her duel avatar’s hard armor, he could feel her trembling. He was just as shocked himself. They might have had three separate Incarnate techniques piled on against them, but the fact that the executives of both Nega Nebulus and Prominence had been annihilated in an instant was nothing other than a nightmare.

  However, they couldn’t just stay there like that. Their fourteen comrades would regenerate in an hour, and they would very likely be killed again instantaneously with the same multiple Incarnate techniques. Fuko and the other high rankers had points to spare, but that wasn’t necessarily the case for Ash Roller and his gang—or for the members of Petit Paquet. They had to return to the bus in the real world as soon as possible and remove everyone’s Neurolinkers.

  “Metatron, where’s the next-nearest portal?” Haruyuki asked in a hoarse voice, holding Chiyuri in his arms.

  The 3-D icon moved to be positioned in front of Haruyuki’s face and indicated the southwest with one wing. “It’s approximately a kilometer in that direction.”

  Hurriedly drawing out a map of the Minato area in his mind, he overlaid the landmarks in the real world. “Gotanda Station, then…”

  “But, Servant, most likely…”

  Haruyuki guessed what Metatron wasn’t sa
ying and gave voice to the thoughts he’d had earlier. “Yeah, there’s probably a different Super-class Enemy placed there, too. Maybe we should just head for a faraway portal.”

  “I can confirm from the Highest Level the presence of a Being in the vicinity of the portal, but there is a strong possibility that that Snow Fairy or what have you will interfere again, regardless of the distance. If the link between us is severed, the situation will be all that much worse.”

  Metatron was right. The only advantage Haruyuki and Chiyuri had against the Oscillatory side was Metatron’s presence. Even the White Legion wouldn’t be able to easily obtain the full cooperation of a Divine-class Enemy. Tactically, he couldn’t lose her, and emotionally, he couldn’t stand the thought of being without this rapport they had.

  In other words, in this battlefield, at least, scouting from the Highest Level was effectively not an option.

  “Once I recharge my special-attack gauge, we’ll fly south to Kawasaki. They can’t have set Enemies outside of Tokyo, too…I think,” Haruyuki muttered, half to reassure himself, and then took his hand off Chiyuri’s back and looked around.

  The roof of the hotel was deserted, but there were decorative objects arranged along the outer edges that would probably have been air ducts and solar panels in the real world. If he could smash those, he’d be able to recover his special-attack gauge to some degree.

  “Hang on a sec,” Haruyuki said to Chiyuri as he was about to move toward the closest of the objects.

  However, Metatron suddenly flashed a tapered beam of light, and taking this as a warning, Haruyuki instantly reached for the hilt of the sword on his hip—the Enhanced Armament Lucid Blade.

  In the right edge of his field of view, there was another small flicker. By the time he realized it was a reflection of the dawn light dyeing the eastern sky red, Haruyuki had yanked his sword upward.

  A glittering blade grazed Lime Bell’s pointed hat and squealed sharply. Repelled by Haruyuki’s quick draw, a metal stick with six sharply tapered cross sections was thrust into the roof—a so-called bo-shuriken. The sickening color painted on the skin of the steel was probably poison.

  “Who’s there?!” Haruyuki called out to the north side of the roof, keeping Chiyuri behind him. But the answer to that question was more than half-apparent. It had to have been the member of Oscillatory who’d been pursuing them.

  Finally, a human figure appeared as if bleeding out from behind an air duct. His face mask hid everything but his eye lenses, and the thin armor had a somehow traditionally Japanese shape to it. The naked body of the avatar was very slightly exposed around the neck and upper arms, and this was covered in a bodysuit that looked as if it had been knit from wire. He didn’t need to see the dark-gray, blue-tinged color of the armor; the nature of their pursuer was clear from the design motif.

  “A ninja?” Chiyuri murmured from behind him.

  Without reacting to Haruyuki’s challenge or Chiyuri’s question, the ninja-shaped avatar thrust his right hand into his chest. The fingers that reemerged had two shuriken wedged between them, exactly the same as the one that had stabbed into the roof.

  Since the large majority of buildings in a Demon City stage were impenetrable, the blue ninja must have climbed the dozens of meters up the side of the building, with essentially no handholds. From this fact alone, it was obvious that Haruyuki needed to keep his guard up tight against this opponent. But he couldn’t fall now. Absolutely not.

  “Haru, I’m fine. I can protect myself,” Chiyuri said, leaping far back before dropping into a defensive position.

  Nodding wordlessly, Haruyuki readied his sword directly in front of his body. He’d obtained Lucid Blade as his level-six bonus, and that day was the first time he was using it in actual combat. If he was being completely honest, he was overwhelmingly unaccustomed to it when his fighting style so far had been punches and kicks, but even so, it meant a great deal to him to be holding the sword.

  With the silver blade turned on him, the ninja avatar reached a hand around to his back and drew a truncated blade from the black-lacquer sheath equipped there. Single-edged with no curve to it, a so-called ninja sword.

  Gripping the two shuriken in his right hand and the shortsword in his left, the avatar moved nonchalantly, almost as though the idea of two against one didn’t bother him in the slightest. He took three steps forward.

  And then vanished.

  Except—he had simply bounded to the right at incredible speed. Haruyuki managed to catch a fragment of a blue afterimage in the corner of his eye, and he sought out the figure of his enemy as he leapt in the opposite direction.

  He wasn’t there. Despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing to hide behind in the center of the roof, there wasn’t another soul in the wide-open area. But it had only been the blink of an eye since the ninja stepped out of Haruyuki’s sight; there was no way he would have been able to leave the roof in that span of time.

  Haruyuki stopped for a moment.

  “Servant! Below!” The thought from Metatron pierced his head like a lightning bolt. But the area at his feet was covered in the steel of the Demon City stage, and only the shadow of the skyscraper a little ways off to the east—

  Haruyuki gasped.

  From within that shadow, the blue ninja appeared, accompanied by the faint babbling of water, slicing his sword toward Haruyuki’s right ankle.

  If Haruyuki had thrust Lucid Blade downward even a millisecond later, he likely would have had his foot amputated. But the blade just barely managed to defend against the cutting attack, and it squealed fiercely, sparks shooting everywhere. It was all Haruyuki could do to hold on to the sword; a counterattack was out of the question. But rather than fight against the reactive force, the ninja slipped out of the shadow and once again put some distance between them.

  Haruyuki pulled the tip of his sword out from where it had bitten ever so slightly into the steel floor and stepped once more into the shadow with his uninjured foot. But the only thing he felt was unyielding hardness; his foot showed no sign of sinking down.

  In other words, he was looking at either the ninja avatar’s special attack or ability. He must have used the same power to climb the hotel wall. And Haruyuki was already familiar with a similar technique.

  “That was Black Vise’s technique just now,” Haruyuki said in a low voice, staring intently at the still-silent ninja.

  Here the man finally responded. He narrowed his dark eye lenses into a thread, and a voice worn like a cold wind in the dead of winter rang out. “Indeed. The secret technique Shadow Lurker, taught to me by my master.”

  “So then you acknowledge it. The fact that the Acceleration Research Society’s Black Vise is a member of Oscillatory Universe!” Haruyuki had intended this to be cutting, but his adversary showed not the slightest sign of upset.

  “Inevitable, that knowledge,” he replied calmly. “Thus determined, those persons shall find total loss here.” The dark-blue eye lenses shone briefly with a light as cold as ice.

  There had been no information about a ninja-type avatar in Kuroyukihime’s notes. Which meant, at the very least, he wasn’t one of the Seven Dwarves, but even if he was as powerful as the likes of Glacier Behemoth or Snow Fairy, Haruyuki absolutely could not allow himself to be defeated. Fuko, Utai, and the others had gone so far as to sacrifice themselves so that Haruyuki and Chiyuri could get away. Even if all the nearby portals were blocked, he absolutely had to return to the real world and save everyone from this death trap.

  This resolve humming through every cell of his body, Haruyuki readjusted his grip on his beloved sword. In response, the ninja also wordlessly readied the shortsword in his left hand.

  What Haruyuki believed was the advantage to having a sword was the fact that it expanded his own range of options while simultaneously narrowing his opponent’s.

  In the real world, the sword had fallen out of use in actual combat with the sudden development of the gun and had been transformed i
nto a symbolic and decorative tool, but that was not necessarily the case in the Accelerated World. Just as could be gleaned from the fact that the red-type avatars and their long-distance attacks could fight just as well as blue-type avatars with close-range attacks, a duel avatar’s sword could perform in ways that surpassed a gun.

  What made this possible was the Burst Linker’s super-high reaction speed. Just as Haruyuki had repelled the poisoned shuriken earlier, he could defend against attacks that he would otherwise have been forced to use a bare hand against. Pushing this defense via sword to the extreme, he would even be able to handle large artillery and missiles.

  When Haruyuki readied his sword, the ninja had pulled out his own. Now, though he still had the two shuriken in his right hand, he could only throw them with that hand.

  I’ll bring the fight in close and stop him from sinking into the shadows. If it’s a contest of speed, I can’t lose! Even against a ninja!

  With this intention close to his heart, Haruyuki used up what little remained of his special-attack gauge and pushed the wings on his back into action without shifting his position in the slightest. A full-speed dash with no preparatory movement, followed by his sword slicing downward—or at least a show of that—before launching a mid-kick.

  The surprise attack only half succeeded; the kick was blocked with an elbow. The ninja’s armor strength did indeed appear to be the bare minimum, however, so while Haruyuki couldn’t see his opponent’s health gauge, the feedback he got told him the damage had made it all the way to the naked avatar body inside.

  While Haruyuki’s leg was still in the air, he used the charge to his special-attack gauge he’d gotten from the blow to swing into a right roundhouse kick. The ninja guarded against this, too, with his other elbow, but now that both arms had been hit with Haruyuki’s unique stinging Aerial Combo blows, they would have to have been numbed, if only for an instant.

  “Hah!” Using his wings again for a short-distance thrust, this time he really did bring his sword down with a battle cry. Given how close together they were, Lucid Blade’s sharp edge should have caught the ninja’s torso. However.