Accel World Vol. 21: The Snow Sprite Read online

  That said, the tables had most definitely not yet turned in their favor. Trilead just barely dodged the next blow. If he took another blow from that sword in the same place, the damage would be lethal.

  “Lead!” Feeling as if he had to somehow break the ninja’s Incarnate restraint, Haruyuki tried to focus his imagination again.

  “Believe in Trilead, Servant.” Metatron’s voice echoed in the back of his mind.

  “…But…!”

  “It was you who taught me the ability to have an information link—no, a ‘bond.’”

  His eyes flew open at this. Adjusting his gaze, he saw Chiyuri staring back at him intently with her large eye lenses, similarly restrained on the south side of the roof. Although he saw worry and frustration there, he saw no hint of despair. She, too, believed Lead would get out of this predicament.

  “I guess you’re right,” Haruyuki murmured in return, once again focusing his mind. Not in order to forcefully break the ninja’s Shadow Tying with his own Incarnate, but so he could move the second the ninja’s focus was broken by Lead’s attack and the technique was canceled.

  Although deeply wounded on his elbow and his neck, Trilead readied his greatsword for the third time at waist level.

  The one-armed ninja also held his ninja sword in a backhand grip with his right hand. There wasn’t a drop of wasted energy in his stance, and his cold bloodlust came through loud and clear with the message that this time he would take Lead’s head.

  After inhaling deeply, Lead gently raised the Arc he gripped in both hands to a position up above his head.

  In response, the ninja also lowered his center of gravity the slightest bit.

  The tension in the air grew a hundredfold. Perhaps in response to the swirling blood lust, the clouds began to rise up and cover the nearly risen morning sun.

  As if refusing to be pushed back by the encroaching darkness, Lead’s battle cry gushed from his throat. “Taaaaaaaaaah!!”

  Stepping forward hard enough to crack the steel panels of the roof, his sword came down with a roar like thunder. This was, without a doubt, the blow containing the most raw power Haruyuki had ever seen in any normal attack he’d witnessed thus far. It shook him to his core, surpassing even World End’s and Anomaly’s slashing blows.

  But of course, it was too much of a straightforward stroke.

  Once again, the figure of the ninja melted into flowing lines. In a step that was also terrifyingly fast, he dodged to the left. The greatsword cut through the blue-black afterimage and, not stopping in the air, went on to dig into the floor.

  A booming roar ripped past Haruyuki, so loud that he was convinced it would have ruptured his eardrums if duel avatars had them. The force of the overhead slice was completely absorbed by the iron plates, the Arc cutting deep into the building of the Demon City stage, and then stopped.

  Lead was unable to move, and the ninja blade closed in on his neck in a sneak attack.

  However, at the same time, the rupture The Infinity had created stretched out in a straight line—and swallowed up the small shuriken pinned into Haruyuki’s shadow.

  There was no way this was a coincidence.

  Lead had been aiming for this from the start. As he swung his sword in his simple, honest slices and swallowed the painful counterattacks, he’d moved to a position where he could aim for Haruyuki’s restraints. If Lead had taken any obvious interest in the shuriken, the ninja would have no doubt prioritized taking off Haruyuki’s head. To prevent him from doing that, Lead had played dumb and used himself as a pawn to create a momentary opening. In which case, Haruyuki had to rise to that challenge.

  The instant the shuriken was swallowed up in the fissure and the restraint released, Haruyuki was moving. Half instinctively, he thrust his blade toward the back of the ninja about to take Lead’s head off. Seven meters between them. This was not a distance he could cross no matter how he stretched his arm.

  However.

  As he sent the imagination power he’d so intently built up while restrained to his hand, Haruyuki shouted, “Laser Lance!!”

  Pure-white light jetted from the tip of his sword. This light was obviously narrower, sharper, and faster than the Laser Lance he’d been able to activate before with his bare hand.

  The time it took for the ninja to dodge Lead’s blow, step in, and slash with his ninja sword couldn’t have been more than a second. But the Incarnate lance launched from Lucid Blade pierced the ninja’s back before his special-attack blade could cut into Lead’s neck.

  Even duel avatars with no flesh and blood to speak of had what were known as critical points. So, for instance, if their head was cut off, the majority of avatars would die instantly. The next critical point was in the center of the chest, in the position of the heart, and no avatars except those with extremely high endurance could have a hole opened up there and not die.

  Having had his heart pierced by Haruyuki’s Incarnate technique, the ninja was only able to make a shallow cut on Lead’s cheek, his blade knocked off target by the impact. He stopped with his ninja sword brandished high above his head, and Haruyuki fully expected him to scatter in all directions.

  However.

  “Nin!!” Shouting louder than he had before, the ninja quickly rotated his upper body, light effect spilling from the hole in his chest, and tried to thrust the shortsword into Lead’s neck once again.

  But an instant before he could, the young samurai pulled his trusty blade from the rupture in the floor.

  “Aaaaaii!” Shouting, he yanked the thick blade up and to the right.

  The sun pushed through the clouds once more and illuminated the motionless ninja and the young samurai. From where Haruyuki stood, their shadows looked like half silhouettes, and then one of them split soundlessly in the middle and tumbled to the floor. It jetted up blue-black flames before bursting and scattering.

  Slowly getting to his feet, Trilead tucked the greatsword away in the sheath on his left hip, and Haruyuki was about to race over to him, lost in the moment. But he totally forgot that his right foot had been cut off, so he lost his balance and nearly fell over.

  “Whoops!” Chiyuri called out, coming up from behind to support him, having been released from the Incarnate restraint at the moment of the ninja’s death.

  He stood, leaning on his childhood friend’s shoulder, and waved a hand wildly. “Lea—,” he started to shout, but just when he was in danger of the 3-D icon on his shoulder whapping him on the head with her wing, he noticed it.

  A modest dark-gray death marker remained in the place where the ninja had died. Haruyuki and his comrades couldn’t see him, but the ninja avatar still existed there in a ghost state. Lead was Trilead Tetroxide’s nickname, but even still, there was no need to give it up to their enemy. Letting him hear their conversation was absurd.

  Guessing the reason that Haruyuki snapped his mouth shut, Lead was also silent as he walked over to them, and he bowed lightly with a smile.

  Nodding in return, Haruyuki turned back to the silently spinning death marker and said in a hard voice, “If we wanted to, we could kill you again with an Incarnate technique the moment you regenerate here in an hour or set up some dangerous energy…But we won’t. We’re not like the Acceleration Research Society.”

  Of course, he couldn’t hear the reply. But even if the death marker could speak, Haruyuki couldn’t imagine that the ninja avatar would give him an answer when he hadn’t even given voice to his own name. Haruyuki looked back and held out his left hand to Chiyuri and his right to Lead.

  They approached and grabbed onto him. After checking that his special-attack gauge was charged nearly 80 percent, he spread the wings on his back and took off. Maintaining a high altitude, he looked down just one more time at the roof of the hotel.

  The ninja avatar had called Black Vise master. Did he know that Vise had cruelly abandoned Dusk Taker, his former comrade in the Acceleration Research Society? That to Vise, it wasn’t just Taker, but probably also Rust J
igsaw and Sulfur Pot and maybe even the Quad Eyes Analyst, who were nothing more than pawns for the sake of achieving his objective?

  Haruyuki pulled his gaze away from the ghost that would’ve been standing near the death marker and flew off to the southeast.

  3

  “Headed your way, Lotus!”

  Hearing the call of the second Red King, the Black King readied the swords that made up her arms before and behind her.

  Charging toward her and making the ground shake was a Beast-class Enemy, Grada. Eight short legs sprang from its knotty torso, and a thick carapace covered its entire body; it looked like a microscopic water bear that had been enlarged tens of thousands of times over. In fact, it had apparently gotten its name from early Burst Linkers riffing on its scientific name, the tardigrade.

  Just as its name would suggest, it boasted an overwhelming toughness, and although Niko’s handgun had carved countless bullet holes out of the gray carapace, it seemed that almost none had pierced it. Niko’s initial equipment, Peace Maker, was capable of a so-called charged shot, and she boasted on a daily basis about how “You gimme twenty seconds o’ charging, and I’ll blow a giant hole in the ground even.” But now, unfortunately, they didn’t have that kind of time to spare. They were fighting a Beast-class Enemy alone, when this was the sort of monster normally hunted by a party of twenty people.

  “Baguuuuh!” the Grada type cried out in a low rumble as it charged her.

  Kuroyukihime stopped and waited for it. Nearly three minutes had passed already since the start of this unexpected battle. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time here. She set her sights on one of the dozens of bullet holes gouged into the Enemy’s head, where the slightest amount of blue-black liquid was leaking out. It was a nearly impossible feat to strike a precise blow on this three-centimeter hole as it bounced about wildly, but she had no choice but to try.

  “Baguuuuh!” The massive tardigrade lowered its head to charge, forceful enough to bring down a building, and in that instant, Kuroyukihime thrust the sword of her right hand forward.

  Her Terminate Sword ability could pierce all things, and that included even the head armor of this thing, but she wouldn’t be able to do any real damage plunging it in only five or ten centimeters. But the sword cut deep into the scar made by Niko, all the way up to her elbow, opening the hole wider.

  Despite the fact that a sword was stabbed nearly a meter deep into its head, the Grada didn’t stop moving. It began to crash about even more violently, Kuroyukihime still on its head. If it charged into one of the buildings behind them, she could very well be crushed to death between the hard structure of the Demon City stage and the Enemy’s massive bulk. But she had anticipated this development.

  “Death By Piercing!!” she cried out sharply as she pushed her arm even deeper.

  A bluish-purple light jetted out of all the gunshot holes. Black Lotus’s level-five special attack, boasting a wide and long range, reflected and refracted against the inside of the tough carapace over and over, shredding any and all soft tissue. Light spilled out of cracks that raced along the tough shell as if connecting the dots of gunshot scars.

  In the next instant, the Beast-class Enemy erupted in a burst of light that reached up into the dawn sky, and the massive body scattered in all directions.

  Bathed in a universe of tiny particles, Kuroyukihime landed on the ground and let out a long sigh as Niko raced over to her.

  “Dang it…Just like always, you go and do somethin’ wild. If you’d made one misstep there, you coulda ended up flat as a pancake.”

  “I attacked with my arm, so it would be ‘one misarm.’”

  “Oh yeah…I guess?” Niko cocked her head to one side, and Kuroyukihime pushed it upright with the flat of her blade.

  “Ugh! That doesn’t matter! What’s more important…is what exactly’s going on here?” Kuroyukihime looked up at the sky of the stage.

  The night of the Demon City stage absolutely did not break, yet the eastern sky was steadily growing redder. And the only health gauge visible to her was her own. And above all else, there were Enemies. Which meant…

  “No matter which way you look at it, this is the Unlimited Neutral Field,” Niko muttered.

  They were supposed to be handling the defense of their own territory in Suginami, instead of taking part in the attack on Minato Area No. 3, the headquarters of the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe. But when they’d gotten off the bus with Fuko Kurasaki, Haruyuki Arita, and the others and crossed over to the bus stop on the opposite side of the street, she’d seen someone who should not have been there in the window of the bus that followed.

  Megumi Wakamiya. Umesato Junior High student council secretary and Kuroyukihime’s good friend.

  Kuroyukihime had wondered for a while if Megumi wasn’t a former Burst Linker who had lost all her memories of the Accelerated World, and she couldn’t believe her being there now was a mere coincidence. So she’d decided to give chase on the next bus. Along the way, they’d switched to a taxi, and she’d gone so far as to use the forbidden SSS Order program to cross the area boundary immediately before four PM and spontaneously take part in the Territories.

  But after she and Niko appeared on the Rainbow Bridge, on the far edge of the area, they’d run for a few minutes toward the center of the stage in order to meet up with the rest of their team, and that was when a veil of light like an aurora had closed in from up ahead and enveloped them. The ground shook fiercely, and just when that was settling down, a large Enemy materialized before their eyes. Retreating to the Rainbow Bridge was not an option, and while it was all fine and good that they had won when forced to fight, she was still unable to completely process the situation.

  Niko turned her gaze back from the morning sun rising over Odaiba and blinked her large eye lenses again. “If this is the real-deal Unlimited Neutral Field, then it’s either a BB system bug or something—someone who deliberately made this happen, right?”

  “It’s been eight years since Brain Burst started. I can’t believe there would still be such an enormous bug at this late stage. Most likely, it’s the latter.” Kuroyukihime let a certain situation play out in the back of her mind.

  In Okinawa on her school trip, she had been in the Unlimited Neutral Field with the Acceleration Research Society’s Sulfur Pot when there was a sudden beam of light. A duel avatar she’d assumed was Megumi Wakamiya had appeared out of nowhere in the battlefield and changed the attribute of the stage using an incredible technique that artificially brought about the Change. Of course, changing the attribute of the Unlimited Neutral Field and changing the Territories stage into the Unlimited Neutral Field were phenomena on an utterly different scale. But the directionality was the same. And it was also very likely that Megumi had dived into this battlefield, too, probably as an Oscillatory member.

  Was this astounding transition Megumi’s work? If that was the case, then was it something she had willed herself, or…

  “Hey, Lotus!” Niko jabbed her in the side, and Kuroyukihime awoke from her reverie.

  “Aah, apologies. This is not the time for deep thought.”

  “ ’Zactly. That pink aurora looked like it was spreading out from the center of Minato Three. So it’s not just us. Pard and Crow and them musta got caught up in it, too.”

  “And most likely, the Oscillatory Universe defense team, as well. We don’t know what could happen in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Let’s head for the center as planned. Crow and the others should be there.”

  Nodding to each other, Kuroyukihime and Niko started to run along the deserted road, this time watching out for Enemies as they went.

  This wasn’t the first time Chocolat Puppeter, aka Shihoko Nago, had died in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Back when she’d only just made level four, she’d been carelessly walking around the unfamiliar field alone and stumbled across an Enemy. Of course, she’d tried to run away, but she’d taken one laser hit from behind and immediately died with zero f
anfare. She’d steeled herself then for the possibility of total point loss through an Unlimited EK.

  During the hour she waited to be regenerated, she’d thought about all kinds of things and eventually decided that she had no other choice but to use her Chocopets as bait and try to flee. So once she regenerated, she activated her special attack Cocoa Fountain. But even though it was supposed to be attacking her, the Enemy had for some reason shown more interest in the chocolate pond. After sniffing at it for a while, it started to lap it up, and she’d managed to get away in the interim.

  That lesser-class Enemy had been the Lava Carbuncle, Coolu, and while it had taken a long time, she was now Shihoko’s good friend. Since Shihoko had never actively gone Enemy hunting after that, she’d only died in the Unlimited Neutral Field that one time.

  Which is why she didn’t know that dying with your comrades was such a difficult, painful, sad experience. In her field of view—black and white in her ghost state—fourteen death markers rotated quietly, including her own. Satomi and Yume and everyone else from Nega Nebulus would have also been transformed into ghosts like her, hanging about the area. What surprised her a little was that right before she had died, Magenta Scissor—Rui Odagiri—had tried to protect her, with her own body. It might had been an impulsive act, but Shihoko was quietly pleased by it. She wanted to thank her, but Rui’s ghost also couldn’t see or talk to her.

  Around the cluster of markers, a thick wall of ice soared up high, created by the White Legion’s executive member Glacier Behemoth’s Incarnate technique Last Glacial Period. Shihoko and her friends from Petit Paquet had only been given a general overview of the existence and activation logic of Incarnate techniques, but she at least understood the underlying idea that if the imagination was severed, the ice wall would disappear. In other words, even though the fourteen members of Nega Nebulus had been wiped out, Behemoth was continuing to focus on the image.