The Floating Starlight Bridge Read online

  Copyright

  ACCEL WORLD, Volume 5

  REKI KAWAHARA

  Translation by Jocelyne Allen

  Cover art by HIMA

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ACCEL WORLD

  © REKI KAWAHARA 2010

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in 2010 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2015 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: November 2017

  Originally published in paperback in November 2015 by Yen On.

  Yen On is an imprint of Yen Press, LLC.

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-9753-0087-6

  E3-20171027-JV-PC

  1

  They should just turn all of Tokyo into a covered shopping district already.

  Haruyuki’s racing thoughts had a desperate air to them as he walked home from school, kicking up the excess water that was not absorbed into the water-permeable paving tiles.

  He had always hated the rain. The signal strength of his Neurolinker dropped (albeit by only the slightest margin); an umbrella blocked one of the hands he needed to operate his virtual desktop; and worse, his body, which already tended toward dampness, got even damper.

  He stopped at a red light and looked out from under his umbrella. Even though it had been raining the whole day, the heavy, leaden color of the sky was unchanged; the clouds were still swollen with water. On the right edge of his field of view, alongside the news headlines, the chance of rain display was a line of numbers like “eighty” and “ninety” until the following morning. Apparently, the rainy season front had no intention of leaving the Kanto region any time soon.

  How great it would feel to just leap up and shoot through to the other side of that gray expanse. No matter where he looked there would be a sea of white clouds spreading out endlessly against an ultramarine sky, watched over by the blazing sun. This was a sight he had seen countless times in Storm stages, but naturally, he had never experienced it in the real world.

  He could imagine it, at least. Standing on his tiptoes, he flapped his virtual wings and—

  “It’s green, you know!”

  Whap! A hand slapped his back, and Haruyuki practically fell onto the crosswalk. He just barely managed to avoid face-planting into the ground and stepped forward at a brisk pace to hide his embarrassment.

  “…Hey,” he said, looking to his side.

  “Hey.” His interlocutor twirled a bright yellow-green umbrella. Chiyuri Kurashima. She splashed along in water-repellant sneakers, looking for all the world as if she not only did not feel a heavy gloom at the oppressively leaden sky but, in fact, actively enjoyed it.

  “Did you get a new umbrella?”

  When he asked about the unfamiliar object, his childhood friend blinked her catlike eyes awkwardly and nodded.

  “Yeah…And you don’t even need to start with me! I know what you’re going to say! For some reason, I’m just really drawn to this color for little things like this. Because of my avatar, I think.”

  “Yeah, that happens. Before I knew it, my memory card case, my direct cables, they were all silver.”

  Two months earlier, in April, Chiyuri had become a Burst Linker, and the armor of her duel avatar Lime Bell was a lime green just like its name. She hadn’t been very fond of the color at first, but before she knew it, more than a few of her possessions, including her trademark large hair clip, had been replaced with bright green counterparts.

  “But don’t go so far as your Neurolinker. Someone might end up outing you in the real because of it,” he remarked, looking at the pale purple exterior of the VR device attached to her slender neck.

  “Whatever, Haru!” Chiyuri popped her cheeks out. “You and Taku and Kuroyuki all have Neurolinkers the color of your avatars!”

  “B-but I’ve been using this one since forever. The next time I change models, I’m going for a different color.”

  “Proooooobably piano black, I bet.” She glared at him out of the corner of her eye, and his eyes unconsciously froze. His childhood friend laughed, rolling her eyes fondly, as she tilted her brand-new umbrella back and gazed up at the sky from underneath it. “It sure is pouring, though, huh?”

  “Yeah, it really is…Oh, hey. What about practice?” Haruyuki cocked his head to one side, belatedly realizing that normally he, a member of the go-home team, and Chiyuri, a member of the track and field team, never walked home at the same time.

  Chiyuri shrugged. “Whenever it rains, we always stay in the gym doing strength training or we go swimming in the indoor pool,” she replied, as if the whole thing bored her. “But today, other teams are using both, so we ended up having to cancel practice. It’s not fair that Taku and the kendo team get their very own dojo…Aah, if I don’t get some exercise every day, I feel so gross, like all my muscles are fading away or something.”

  “You do? Really?” Haruyuki said, a little admiringly, given that he himself boasted of being a version of humanity that was the polar opposite of an athlete.

  Chiyuri blinked as if remembering something and abruptly took a step toward him, placing her hand on his arm. He grew flustered at the sudden contact, and under her sharp gaze to boot.

  “I’ve got it, Haru,” she said. “Work out with me.”

  “H-huh?!” His eyelids flew back, and his mouth flapped open and shut before he finally managed to ask, “W-work out…Where…How…”

  “What’s that reaction about? O-ohh! You were thinking something perverted, weren’t you?!” Her stern glare poured down over him once more before she brought a teasing smile to her lips. “I was just thinking we could go and duel. Tag team–style. What else could I have possibly meant, hmm, Professor Arita?”

  “Th-that’s totally what I was talking about. Obviously.” Haruyuki feigned a calm he didn’t feel and cleared his throat conspicuously before continuing. “What I meant was, what area and what kind of rules we should fight with.”

  “Ohh, hmm, well.” Fortunately, she was apparently willing to bail him out here; a broad smile spread across her face as she pointed at the Chuo Line above the road ahead of them. “It’s still early. Let’s go to Shinjuku. Maybe we can get above the clouds if we’re on the observation deck at the government office.”

  “I seriously doubt that, but whatever, sounds good.” He shrugged and was aware once again of the weight of Chiyuri’s hand still resting on his right arm.

  Fourteen
years earlier, in 2033, Haruyuki Arita and Chiyuri Kurashima had been born in the same high-rise condo complex in north Koenji. Their apartments were also only two floors apart, so they had basically been raised like twins since infancy. Given how large the complex was, there were of course many other children their age in the building, but the only person, other than Chiyuri, Haruyuki had been friends with in that whole expanse of time was Takumu Mayuzumi, who lived in a different wing.

  Takumu had gone to a different elementary school, so Haruyuki could forget his everyday worries when they were hanging out. And the sole reason his relationship with Chiyuri hadn’t changed, despite the fact that they went to the same school, was likely because of her strength and kindness.

  When he started to be targeted by older bullies in elementary school, Haruyuki, not wanting Chiyuri to see him in such a pathetic state, had tried to put some distance between himself and her, but she had stubbornly refused to let him. He understood now just how much pressure she must have faced back then for remaining friends with a kid everyone else picked on. And yet, until they were in fifth grade, she had walked home to the condo with him every day and hung out until evening, inviting Takumu to join them to play video games or explorers. That time the three of them spent together after school was etched deep in Haruyuki’s memory with a golden hue.

  Oh, hey, maybe it’s like that for Chiyuri, too.

  Because the resource for the pseudo–healing ability of Chiyuri’s duel avatar, Lime Bell, was probably—

  “Train’s here.” She jabbed him with an elbow, and he raised his head to see that the train was already pulling into the Chuo Line platform.

  “Right,” he assented, watching the orange train car coming in from the west, and then adding in a small voice, “…Huh, Chiyu.”

  “Huh? You say something?”

  “N-no, nothing.” Haruyuki hurriedly shook his head, feeling his chest tighten for some reason at the sight of his childhood friend looking back at him, her short hair swinging. “Oh! We might be able to get seats!”

  “Come on, it’s only two stations!” An exasperated voice he was only too familiar with chased after him as he flew into the train car.

  After taking the pedestrian walkway that stretched out underground from Shinjuku Station’s west exit to the government building, they jumped onto the elevator that went directly to the observation deck on the top floor.

  Vween. A brief sense of acceleration pushed down on them and then disappeared. The digital floor-number display on the wall changed with incredible speed, and the concrete wall soon turned to glass.

  “Whoa,” Chiyuri cried out as they flew upward. “Amazing, this gray…”

  “You can’t really see anything with the rain.”

  He had expected this. Hindered by the curtain of ceaseless rain, they could see almost nothing of the vast evening metropolis that should have been unfolding before them to the south. And as they went higher, mist clung to the glass, blocking the city from view entirely. The elevator decelerated—making them feel like they were floating—and finally stopped, along with the announcement that they had arrived. Beyond the doors, the world was dyed a uniform white.

  Rebuilt in the thirties, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building now rose up to a height of five hundred meters. The only building in Japan, never mind Tokyo, that was taller was Tokyo Skytree in Sumida Ward. But Skytree’s second observation deck was at an altitude of 450 meters, so the top floor of the government building was actually the point in central Tokyo closest to the sky.

  Running out of the elevator, Chiyuri placed both hands on the expansive glass in front of her. “Whoa! Amazing, it’s totally white.”

  “So basically, we’re in the mist now, instead of the rain.” Grinning wryly, Haruyuki came to stand next to Chiyuri. The other side of the window gleamed a milky color, as though it had been covered in thick cotton.

  “Too bad, huh? We can’t see the sky at all,” he said.

  Chiyuri, who had always been terrible at giving up, glared up at the sky, but then quickly looked back at him and smiled. “Well, whatever. Thanks to this, we have the whole place to ourselves.”

  And indeed in the midst of this foul weather, on a weekday evening to boot, there weren’t too many idly curious city dwellers bothering to come up to the observation deck; not a soul was around.

  “We came all this way! We make at least one round!” Chiyuri shouted, abruptly hooking her left arm through Haruyuki’s right and yanking him forward.

  “R—! R-right.”

  Somehow, Haruyuki generally managed to speak to Chiyuri normally in his real-world voice like he had when they were kids, but if she got the slightest bit cozy, the behavior of his mouth and tongue immediately became suspect. Giggling at his affected state, Chiyuri started walking clockwise around the outer passage of the observation deck.

  Naturally, no matter how far they went, the scene outside did not change. White lumps of cloud simply twisted beyond the clinging droplets of water. Still, Chiyuri moved her feet rhythmically, without pulling even one dissatisfied face.

  The current state of his relationship with his childhood friend was a little hard for him to grasp. Two months earlier, right after a particularly difficult and painful battle, Chiyuri had wrapped her arms around the necks of Haruyuki and Takumu and hugged them, shouting through her tears, “I love you both.” Ever since, she had been completely carefree and open with them and tried to have the three of them hang out as much as she could, in the very spirit of this declaration. It was almost like she was trying to rewind time, back to when they had played together every day until it got dark outside.

  “That reminds me, Haru.”

  “Wh-what?” Haruyuki abruptly lifted his face at hearing his name.

  “We came to duel and everything. We might as well connect globally already. Then the tourist information tags will show up outside.”

  “Ohh…Right.”

  They were currently disconnected from the global net. Shinjuku Ward was the territory of the Blue Legion, Leonids, which meant that if they left their connection on, another Burst Linker could challenge them at any moment. Hypothetically, going into duel standby mode while on the road was dangerous, but up here on the deserted observation deck, they would have no problems if they were automatically accelerated without advance notice.

  Haruyuki nodded and first opened his Brain Burst controls to team up with Lime Bell. This way, on the matching list, they would be clearly noted as a tag team, and their challengers would basically be limited to other two-person teams. Then, he and Chiyuri simultaneously connected their Neurolinkers to the global net.

  Immediately, countless tiny holotags popped up to fill his field of view, the guidance display for all the famous spots and big buildings they would have been able to see if the sky had been clear. Among the names he could see were nearby Shinjuku Station and Southern Terrace, with Kabukicho beyond them both, so he assumed they were facing east.

  “I guess looking at just the tags isn’t so interesting, after all.” As Chiyuri laughed wryly, the thick clouds momentarily opened up as if the weather gods were taking pity on them, and the heart of Tokyo in the evening light suddenly spread out before them. She flew over to the window with a cry of delight, and Haruyuki hurried to stand next to her.

  Seen with the naked eye from an elevation of five hundred meters, the massive city presented a chaotic figure, a tapestry woven from five hundred years of history. Just when you noticed the cutting-edge layered structures glittering brilliantly around Shinjuku Station, the sites of Shinjuku Gyoen and Akasaka immediately beyond that sunk into a dim gloom, almost entirely unchanged from the previous century. And farther off in the east was an even darker space, vast, reminiscent of the large black hole at the center of the Milky Way—the Imperial Palace.

  Obviously, in the real world, this was a place where the casual visitor was not permitted, but Burst Linkers like Haruyuki and his friends were also unable to touch images from insid
e the palace because—highly exceptional for modern-day Japan—the security system in that space was not connected to the social camera network. Thus, the game was unable to reproduce the real structure from camera images as it did for other famous places, and so the Imperial Palace in the Unlimited Neutral Field of the Accelerated World was always an original, magic-castle-type structure.

  But then, how would the opposite situation work?

  Currently, the Brain Burst program hacked into the nationwide social camera net to create its Field. Its range included even Okinawa prefecture, which was not actually connected to the main island of Honshu; that fact allowed Kuroyukihime to run across the sea stretching out from Okinawa to Tokyo in the Unlimited Field. So what if there were also places outside Japan monitored by social cameras? Would Burst Linkers be able to “go” there…

  “Hey, Chiyu?” Haruyuki said as he stared absently off into the east.

  “Hmm? What?”

  “Lately, okay? On the news, there was this story about exporting the social camera technology—”

  Did you hear about it?

  Haruyuki didn’t get to finish his question.

  Skreeeeee! A familiar screech assaulted his ears, and his vision went black. Automatic acceleration. In other words, some Burst Linkers in the Shinjuku area had found the Haruyuki/Chiyuri tag team on the matching list and immediately challenged them to a duel. In the center of the darkness burned red, flaming text: HERE COME NEW CHALLENGERS!!

  The thought of only a millisecond earlier was at once swept away by his excitement at the duel, his first outside the Nega Nebulus area in a long time.

  2

  Legs enveloped in silver armor landed on a thick, mossy branch. When he lifted his head, the scene had completely changed from the rainy skyscrapers of a moment before. The sky was a bizarre mauve, and all the tall buildings had been transformed into enormous, rough, and bony trees. Several thick ropes of ivy hung down among these, with a few pterosaur-like silhouettes flying leisurely among them.

  Haruyuki looked down on the dense forest below from a branch near the terrifyingly high peak of what had been the Shinjuku Government Building. “Ugh,” he grumbled. “A Primeval Forest stage. I’m bad at these.”