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  Copyright

  ACCEL WORLD, Volume 12

  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 2012

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in 2012 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

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

  English translation © 2017 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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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kawahara, Reki, author. | HIMA (Comic book artist), illustrator. | Beepee, designer. | Allen, Jocelyne, 1974– translator.

  Title: Accel world / Reki Kawahara ; illustrations, HIMA ; design, bee-pee; translation by Jocelyne Allen.

  Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2014–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2014025099 | ISBN 9780316376730 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296366 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296373 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296380 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296397 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316296403 (v. 6 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316358194 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316317610 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316502702 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316466059 (v. 10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316466066 (v. 11 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316466073 (v. 12 : pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Science fiction. | Virtual reality—Fiction. | Fantasy.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K1755Kaw 2014 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2014025099

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-46607-3 (paperback)

  978-1-9753-0093-7 (ebook)

  E3-20171123-JV-PC

  1

  “…So it’s finally my turn…”

  Haruyuki gaped as the pounding rain of the Storm stage beat down on him.

  The owner of the voice was a relatively small duel avatar on the ground in front of him. His four limbs were splayed out, his body half-buried in the surface of the road, cracks radiating out around him. His full armor was heavy metal, a matte gray tinged with brown.

  After school the day before, Haruyuki had been completely and utterly trounced by this metal-color avatar. He had been so badly beaten that immediately after the duel, tears of regret had flowed down his face. But overnight, he had managed to pull himself to his feet again and now, after a little special training, had returned to challenge his victor to a revenge match.

  This duel ended up being the flip side of their first: Haruyuki had slashed his opponent’s health gauge down to a mere 10 percent by taking in his attacks and using them to slam his foe into the ground. But then something baffling occurred: His duel opponent, still prone on the concrete, had made this pronouncement about his turn, but in a voice and tone that were completely different from before.

  Duel avatars—the virtual armor the Brain Burst program gave to the boys and girls who became Burst Linkers—lacked mouth and nose structures, except for a few female types. As far as eye lenses go, Takumu’s Cyan Pile and Kuroyukihime’s Black Lotus just had faint, shining spots. In the case of Haruyuki’s Silver Crow, the entire face was covered by a smooth mirrored visor.

  Wolfram Cerberus, the mysterious metal-color avatar referred to as “the genius newb” by many, and his current duel opponent also followed this design line. His face was enveloped from above and below in a metal visor reminiscent of a wolf’s jaws, and the goggles inside could only be glimpsed through a gap of mere centimeters.

  So Haruyuki couldn’t quite pin down where these words of Cerberus’s were coming from, lying as he was in a puddle of water on the road. Normally, this was when he assumed there was a mouth hidden under the visor, but Haruyuki felt a peculiar truth in his gut:

  What had spoken had not been Cerberus’s head. It had been his left shoulder.

  He hadn’t really been aware of it up to that point, but when he looked with this in mind, the shape of Cerberus’s shoulder armor closely resembled the helmet that encased his head. A form with a straight line popping up sharply like a wolf’s head, then a zigzagging line cut across the center like fangs.

  Although the zigzag on his actual head had revealed the goggles inside until a few seconds before, it was now completely closed. Instead, the line on the left shoulder had opened about a centimeter, and a dark light radiated from within. This red glow colored several lines of water trailing along the armor surface, making them look like drops of blood spilling from the maw of a beast.

  “Who are you?” Haruyuki asked hoarsely of the Burst Linker he’d driven to only 10 percent health via his specialized Guard Reversal technique.

  “Heh-heh-heh.” The chuckle he got in reply was like metal creaking. “Who am I? It’s a little late for that, isn’t it? You just mercilessly beat me into the ground, Crow. And I know aaaaaaall about you.”

  “Know? We just dueled for the first time yesterday,” Haruyuki responded reflexively, and then he shook his head slightly. “N-no, wait. Are you really the Cerberus who was fighting me until just a minute ago? It’s kinda like…like you’re a totally different person.”

  “Heh-heh-heh, well, yeah. We were born like that, right from the start. You already know the meaning of Cerberus, right?” the left shoulder armor said, red light blinking.

  Haruyuki gasped. In the back of his mind, the memory of the Wolfram Cerberus vs. Frost Horn duel the previous evening came back to life. His eyes had opened wide in astonishment when Cerberus had closed in with alarming speed and armor strength on Frost Horn, who was four levels higher, so Manganese Blade, an executive member of the Blue Legion, had explained the name to him.

  “Wolfram” was tungsten, the heavy metal with the greatest hardness. And “Cerberus” was a creature from Greek mythology. Given that Haruyuki had played countless fantasy RPGs since he was very little, this monster was familiar to him: a massive dog with three heads, said to be the watchdog of Hell.

  Three. Heads.

  The instant his brain made it to this point, Haruyuki finally understood. Cerberus’s shoulder armor didn’t resemble a head; it was a head. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of logic would give rise to a phenomenon like this, but at any rate, it was a fact that the duel avatar Wolfram Cerberus had been born with three heads. That was why he had been crowned with the name of that three-headed watchdog.

  Most likely, the cheerful, polite boy Haruyuki had been dueling until a few minutes earlier was what would be called Cerberus’s primary personality. And the one with the
rough tone conversing with Haruyuki now was the second.

  “…Kerberos…” The Greek name slipped out of him.

  “Heh-heh-heh.” The second head on Cerberus’s left shoulder laughed for the third time. “That’s right, Crow. Although it took you a little while to realize it. I’ll give you this, though: Your technique’s something else. You’re the first one who’s ever dragged me out in the middle of a duel. Such a thrill. Now I can finally fight, too.”

  Hearing this, Haruyuki finally remembered that this was Nakano Area No. 2—that this was a duel stage. And that Silver Crow and Wolfram Cerberus were in the middle of a battle, with a large Gallery watching.

  “…I know you have all kinds of secrets. But right now, none of that matters,” Haruyuki said resolutely, banishing his own amazement from his body. “Once you dive into the battlefield, all that’s left is to focus on the duel. Let’s continue this chat the next time we’re in the Gallery together or something.”

  He glanced up at the health gauges in the upper part of his field of view. While Crow’s was practically damage-free, Cerberus had been thrown and slammed into the ground with Guard Reversal any number of times; he had barely anything left in his red gauge.

  And the special-attack gauge displayed below his health was completely drained. Which meant that the effective time of Cerberus’s dreadful high-performance ability Physical Immune had ended. Haruyuki had already confirmed in the duel the previous day that given this situation, he could do damage if he aimed for a gap in the armor.

  “If you’re not going to stand up, then I’ll finish things like this,” he said, looking down at Cerberus, who was splayed on the road. He straightened out the fingers of his right hand sharply like a sword and then readied them above his shoulder.

  Even seeing this attack motion, Cerberus didn’t so much as twitch. He might have said, “I finally get to fight,” but it appeared he was ready to throw in the towel.

  Or perhaps he was going to come challenge Haruyuki again once this duel was over. In which case, this would be a proud blow to welcome the next fight. A fundamental rule of Brain Burst was that a player could challenge the same opponent only once a day. The rule wasn’t duel the same opponent, because the system recognized the right of the loser to immediately petition for a revenge match.

  “…Sheh!!”

  With a sharp battle cry, Haruyuki took aim at the throat of the fallen Cerberus and drove his hand straight downward at top speed. A silver light raced forward faster than the falling rain.

  In that instant, the centimeter gap in the zigzag line of Cerberus’s left shoulder suddenly opened wide, and Haruyuki realized with a shock that what he had thought was an eye was actually a mouth. The metal halves of the visor flew away from each other, and in the void of the darkness where they hid, a crimson light jetted upward like flames from deep, deep within.

  The light scattered, coloring the raindrops, and touched Haruyuki’s hand, attacking on its propulsive downward trajectory.

  “Nggh…!” He involuntarily cried out. It wasn’t that he had taken damage or that he had repelled it. His right hand was in fact being irresistibly pulled toward Cerberus’s left shoulder. Forced off course from the target of his attack—Cerberus’s unarmored neck—his hand was jerked toward the gaping maw of his enemy’s shoulder.

  Then I just have to punch right through his shoulder! Haruyuki shouted to himself, and he put everything he had into piercing the red darkness shining deep within the armor.

  But he felt nothing; there was no impact. First, his fingers, his wrist, then his arm almost up to the elbow were plunged into the dark opening, but his senses communicated nothing: no response, no sensation of touch. But that was impossible. Cerberus’s shoulder armor was exactly the same size as his head, twenty centimeters deep at best. Which meant that if Haruyuki’s arm was in there up to the elbow, then his fingers should have long broken through the other side and pushed outward already.

  Haruyuki felt something cold and extremely unpleasant in his arm, through his shoulder, and up his spine. He fiercely yanked back his plunging arm to stop the charge, and his arm began to emerge from the darkness filling this strange mouth.

  And then the fangs closed.

  Clank! A bizarre metallic sound echoed through the stage. The members of the Gallery, watching the events unfold from the roofs on either side of Nakano Street, stirred so loudly they drowned out the din of the pounding rain.

  But Haruyuki wasn’t conscious of this—nor even of Lime Bell’s scream from somewhere in the Gallery. A burning pain shot up from his forearm to the center of his brain. The sensation of pain in the normal duel field was restricted to half that of the Unlimited Neutral Field, but even still, a low cry slipped out from beneath his helmet. “Ghk…!”

  He held his breath and opened his eyes wide. The sharp, tapered edge of Cerberus’s left shoulder armor had bitten deep into his right arm from both above and below. The fangs had dug down two centimeters into Crow’s metallic armor and were trying to burrow even farther in, making a disturbing creaking sound as they did so. In sync with this, Haruyuki’s health gauge was being carved away at a steady pace.

  Tungsten, Wolfram Cerberus’s armor color, had the greatest hardness of all the metal colors. Up until then, that hardness had basically been used for defense, but in the real world, tungsten’s main use was in tools—particularly drills and saw blades. Put another way, this was exactly the kind of situation where tungsten demonstrated its real value.

  Haruyuki decided his armor could withstand the attack, and as he endured the excruciating pain, he tightened his left hand into a fist. He took aim at the dark-gray body exposed at the base of Cerberus’s left shoulder and launched a series of short punches. His enemy’s health gauge was below 10 percent; Haruyuki should have been able to eat away the last of it with three hits.

  But an instant before the first punch could land, Cerberus’s right arm moved to cover the weak point at the base of his neck.

  Nonetheless, Haruyuki beat down with his fist but, hindered by the hard tungsten of Cerberus’s forearm, he was basically unable to do damage.

  The reason Haruyuki had been able to unilaterally back Cerberus into a corner in this revenge match was because of the way he had broadly applied throwing techniques; taking his opponent’s blows and beating him against the ground had rendered Cerberus’s Physical Immune ability useless. In which case, all he had to do now was throw the already downed Cerberus down farther. But with one arm held fast in his opponent’s mouth, that would be difficult. If he forcibly pulled Cerberus up off the ground, the damage to his right arm might grow in scale, and he would be the one injured by the move.

  What am I going to do?! What should I do?! Haruyuki frantically racked his brain as he vainly launched strikes with his left hand.

  It had been eight months since he had become a Burst Linker the previous fall, but this was the first time he had been caught in a biting attack with enough force to dig into his metal armor. But if he couldn’t handle the technique just because he hadn’t seen it before, he’d never seriously be able to make his way through the world of level-six and -seven high rankers. No matter what the attack, there was always a way to counter it. Even in a situation like this, with one arm held fast and the other hand guarded against, there was always some secret trick to turning it all around.

  Haruyuki. He heard the voice from the deepest depths of his head. Against simple hitting techniques, your Way of the Flexible will be an effective weapon. But you must not think you can win with that alone. Your opponent is not an Enemy that merely repeats the same attack patterns; he is a Burst Linker with knowledge and courage. Once he knows his blows will be repelled, he will immediately counter that. For instance, with a throwing technique, a hold technique, some kind of flying tool…

  The owner of the voice was, of course, Haruyuki’s parent—the Black King, Black Lotus, aka Kuroyukihime. But it wasn’t as though she had dived into this battlefield; even if she had
been there, the heavy rain would have prevented her murmured words from reaching him. Instead, this was Haruyuki’s memory. As much as he could, he had carved all the lessons from his swordmaster into the deepest parts of his spirit: an archive for all eternity. The voice came from this place.

  And of those techniques, although it may appear staid, the hold is actually the most difficult to respond to. Because there is a great deal of diversity in the technique logic. In addition to simple physical restraint, there are many attacks that hinder movement with electricity, magnetism, vacuum, and viscous liquids. It is difficult for even a veteran Burst Linker to respond appropriately to all of these the first time they see them.

  However, Haruyuki—in the Accelerated World, you alone have a seemingly effective method of dealing with more than half of the hold techniques. Remember the time when you were sucked in by the magnet avatar of the Yellow Legion? If, rather than a hold fixing an opponent to the terrain, the hold affixes you to the enemy himself…then fly! Fly with your opponent still attached to you. If you reach an altitude high enough to definitively kill your enemy with drop damage alone, then you at least will not lose. As far as I know, there is basically no one who has been able to crash into the most impenetrable object—the ground—and walk away uninjured.

  “…!!”

  His master’s words played back within him as a flash of light less than one-tenth of a second long. And the instant that light reached the end of his nervous system, Haruyuki shifted to action.

  He brandished his left fist in the same motion as his previous useless punches. His opponent Cerberus’s second personality—maybe he could call him Cerberus II—continued to guard the sensitive area at his neck with his right arm. Haruyuki’s fist, which came down toward it regardless, this time opened up halfway down and tightly grabbed ahold of his opponent’s wrist.

  “Unh…Aaah!” Howling, Haruyuki threw his upper body up. His special-attack gauge was nearly fully charged from the battle thus far. He poured all of that shining blue light into the metallic fins on his back.

  Chak! The silver wings deployed. The high-speed vibration of the blade fins pulverized the drops of rain as soon as they hit them, turning the water into a fine mist.