The Black Dual Swordsman Read online

  But Petit Paquet had been disbanded three days earlier—the evening of Friday, July 12. And then the three had become members of the Legion that controlled the adjacent Suginami area, Nega Nebulus.

  They had immediately jumped in with the Territories’ defense the following day, and she thought they’d not done too badly against the Green Legion team, even though they weren’t really used to that sort of thing. But Shihoko and her friends had received an unexpected invitation after that from the Black King, Black Lotus, their new Legion Master, to come meet in the real world and talk.

  “We will most certainly take it into consideration!” Shihoko had responded, quickly and arrogantly, before bursting out, where she sat clutching her head in her hands before the exasperated Satomi and Yume at this very table. She had, in fact, been considering it for two full days since then, and her hesitation had not disappeared.

  It wasn’t simply a fear of breaking the taboo of outing themselves in the real. When she asked, she learned the seven members of Nega Nebulus had been meeting in the real for a while now, and the risk of revealing her real-world self was far greater for the Black King, the greatest traitor in the entire Accelerated World. In fact, Shihoko was forced to conclude that the Black Legion fully trusted her and her friends.

  The truth was, she wasn’t hesitating; she was afraid. The most average of average, Shihoko Nago, did not have the courage to stand before World’s End, Black Lotus—a legend in the Accelerated World—“Strato-Shooter” Sky Raker, and Silver Crow.

  She reached a hand out toward the mirror still on the table and slammed it shut before sighing for the nth time. Shihoko had become a Burst Linker two years earlier when she was in sixth grade. Her parent was Satomi, who’d been in her class. Not only had they not been particularly close, they’d barely spoken, so Shihoko was surprised when Satomi first called out to her. And she was even more surprised when, in a corner of the schoolyard, Satomi asked, “Do you like games?”

  Not long after she became a Burst Linker, she had asked why Satomi decided to make her her scion, but Satomi had only laughed and said, “It felt right.”

  Shihoko didn’t exactly get it then, but later, when she saw Yume reading a cake recipe book in the school library, Shihoko herself “felt right,” so maybe that was all it was.

  Interrupting her thoughts, she pushed back her chair and was about to stand up to make more tea when Satomi said, in an unusually quiet voice, “So, like, I…”

  As Shihoko sat down again, Yume also turned to look at the girl.

  “So, like, I’m super-happy to be sitting here with you now, chatting and eating sweets. I mean, I thought I was going to lose all this.” She slowly lifted her hand to press the center of her chest through the ribbon of her sailor uniform. As if pulled in, Yume made the same gesture. “To be honest, I can’t really remember the time when I was parasitized by the ISS kit. You said to just forget it, Shiho, and I do want to do that…But it’s not okay to forget everything. Yume and I did terrible things to you and Coolu, things we can’t take back. And then Silver Crow and Lime Bell just happened to come along and save us. I can never, ever forget that.”

  Yume and Shihoko nodded slowly. A faint smile rising up on her face, Satomi nodded back and started to speak again.

  “My parent was this older girl who lived in my neighborhood, but two months after she gave me Brain Burst, she lost all her points. I was super-sad then; I felt so alone. I stopped caring about dueling, and I left my global connection off for ages. I even thought about quitting the game. But I guess I did have unfinished business in the Accelerated World. And like, whatever I say, I actually do like my avatar a fair bit.”

  The other two nodded again, deeply. Their duel avatars were not merely game characters. They were unique versions of themselves born from their own identities.

  “So it was when I was all lost, there was a bit of a thing in class. At lunchtime, this dumb boy was fooling around, and he dropped some chocolate sauce on this girl’s bread. But she had a cocoa allergy, right? So the girl, she yells ‘Fine! You eat it!’ and slams the bread into the idiot’s face, and he had to get down on his hands and knees while looking totally ridiculous. It was so good.”

  Shihoko felt her face grow hot. She did feel like maybe there had been a thing like that when she was in sixth grade. “Was that maybe that?” she asked Satomi.

  “Yeah, that’s when it clicked. I’d always pegged her for a quiet kid, but then it was like ‘Oh, you’re a fighter.’ And just as I expected, she succeeded in installing Brain Burst, and she even went on to claim her own child not long after that. I was so happy. That time was…” Satomi looked as though she was thinking hard about those days, and Shihoko also fell into thought before being pulled back by her. “Actually, how did you and Yume meet the condition for BB installation, Shiho? That one about having a Neurolinker equipped right after you were born.”

  “You’re asking that now?!” Shihoko slumped down in her chair and cleared her throat. “I was kind of premature, so I had one to monitor my vitals. And I’m pretty sure it was early education for you, Yume?”

  “Iiit waaas. Didn’t do much, though.” She giggled, the light glinting off her glasses, but there was no doubt that of the three of them, she had the best grades. “So what about you, Sato?”

  “Oh! It was the education thing for me, too,” Satomi replied, somewhat awkwardly.

  “It waaas?” Yume quipped. “No effect, hmm…?”

  “Yeah— Hey! Don’t go saying that! I mean, I’m in the middle of a super-good story here! Shut up and listen!” Satomi kicked and pouted in her seat for a minute before cocking her head to one side. “Uh, where was I?”

  Swallowing a sigh, Shihoko picked up the thread of conversation. “Yume and I became Burst Linkers, and you were sobbing, overcome with emotion.”

  “I—I wasn’t crying! Um, so basically, what I’m trying to say here is we might have disbanded for now in terms of the system, but I super-super-super-love Petit Paquet. And I’m super-super-super-super-grateful to the bird and Bell for saving it when it was on the verge of being destroyed. So I wanna fight with them. And…if we can be friends with them in the real, then I wanna do that, too.”

  Shihoko yanked her head up with a gasp.

  Satomi had said she was happy that Shihoko became a Burst Linker. But the truth was, Shihoko was the one who’d been rescued. She’d finally found a place in this painful world where she could actually be comfortable. For Shihoko, Petit Paquet and this prep room were a shelter. Here, there was nothing to fear. She could breathe so deeply, the air filled her lungs.

  But she couldn’t stay closed off in a little box forever. Nothing lasted forever, not in the Accelerated World and not in the real world, either. At some point, the time would come when the lid was lifted off the box, and she would have to go outside. No matter how hard it was, the time would certainly come when she would have to try her best to breathe and move forward.

  The truth was, that opportunity might have already come a long time ago. It might have been the day when the white crow suddenly danced down in the Unlimited Neutral Field and offered her his hand. Sinking into thought once again, she stared absently at her own hand.

  “Aah, Shiho, you’re thinking about that time when the crow was licking you!” Yume said, laughing.

  “Wha—? N-no! I was just thinking about how I’d punch him when we met in the real!” She clenched her hand into a fist and stood up forcefully before announcing, “I’ve decided! We’re going to Suginami tomorrow after school!”

  ““Wooo!”” Satomi and Yume cried out together and clapped.

  “So then, let’s make some treats to take!” Satomi said. “I wanna be in charge of the tarts! Tarts!”

  “If we’re gonna do it, let’s make some treats that are like us,” Yume suggested. “Mint cheesecake, aaaand plum tart, aaaand carob-chocolate gâteau maybeee?”

  “All right! We’ll go stock up at the market by the station and then go to
your place, Yume!”

  ““Let’s do it!”” They each thrust a hand up into the air.

  “That’s gonna take so long, though,” Shihoko complained as she looked up at the small kitchen window. There, the shadow of a bird cut briefly across a summer sky tinged with the faintest orange.

  5

  “Just because the rainy season’s over doesn’t mean it has to suddenly go full summer on us,” Haruyuki grumbled, the western sun burning into his back. He was on his way home from school after taking care of Hoo, so it was around four, but the temperature displayed on his virtual desktop was exactly thirty degrees Celsius. He wanted to get home as quickly as possible and throw himself into the air-conditioned lobby of his condo, but before he could do that, he had one other mission to accomplish.

  Wednesday, July 17th. Glaring at the date below the temperature, he bent each of the fingers of his right hand. No matter how many times he counted, the fateful Saturday was three days away.

  Saturday morning was the long-awaited closing ceremony for the end of the term. Perhaps thanks to the superhard-mode study group organized by Kuroyukihime, the results of his final exams had been miraculously good, so he wasn’t particularly gloomy about his report card. Once summer vacation started, he wouldn’t be able to see Kuroyukihime as often, but he’d still have to go to school to take care of Hoo, so he’d probably get the chance to see her then. And in August, they were all going to go to Yamagata, which was extremely exciting.

  If it had been just that, then he might actually have been able to look forward to Saturday, but the problem was that afternoon. Four o’clock, to be specific. That was when Nega Nebulus would finally attack Minato Area No. 3 in the Territories, using the recently returned Shibuya Area No. 2 as the bridgehead. They would attack the territory of the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe—and the headquarters of the Acceleration Research Society.

  As for the details involved in this, Nega Nebulus would register an attack on Shibuya Area No. 1, and then immediately prior to four o’clock, Great Wall would abandon the territory. As long as there were no other attacking teams—and the assumption was that there most certainly would not be—Shibuya Area No. 1 would become black territory without a fight, so they would immediately register to attack neighboring Shibuya No. 2, and green would abandon once more. And with that, not even a minute past four o’clock, both areas would have been returned to Nega Nebulus.

  Haruyuki and the others on the attacking team would then go to Minato Area No. 3 in the real world and register an attack. Naturally, the Oscillatory Universe would have a defense team registered, so the real Territories would begin there. If they won, the black flag would fly in Minato Area No. 3, and the White Legion would lose the privilege of blocking the matching list. Nega Nebulus would check the list, and if even one member of the Acceleration Research Society appeared on it, they would be able to state that the White Legion clearly was the Acceleration Research Society.

  That was the general strategy, but there were just two problems. The first was who to ask to take on the role of a third-party matching-list confirmation—the observer.

  This witness was key to everything, so it had to be a Burst Linker with status and popularity. And because they would need to tell him or her in advance that the reason Nega Nebulus was invading Oscillatory territory was because they had Oscillatory pegged as the ringleader, this Burst Linker had to be someone they could trust not to leak the information. Great Wall would be seen as having assisted Nega Nebulus, so they couldn’t ask anyone from the Green Legion. For the same reason, Prominence was also out of the question.

  Which left only three major Legions: Blue Leonids, Purple Aurora, and Yellow CCC. Haruyuki would have been hard-pressed to say that they had a friendly relationship with any of them, but purple and yellow held clear enmity toward black, so by process of elimination, blue was their only option. They couldn’t possibly ask the Blue King himself, however, so they would have to negotiate in secret with some high-ranking member.

  The second issue was who to send in the attack on Minato Area No. 3. Naturally, it would have been ideal to have Nega Nebulus’s full force on the team. Minato was split into three areas, and even if Oscillatory divided their defensive power evenly, there would probably be at least two people from the executive Seven Dwarves, together with another ten general members.

  As a general rule in the Territories, the number of people on the attacking side was matched to the number on the defending side. If there were fewer on the defending side, the attacking side was automatically adjusted downward, but in the case where there were more on the defending side, the match would simply go forward without any team modifications. In other words, assuming the Oscillatory team would have twelve people, they wouldn’t be able to fight fairly in terms of numbers unless they put together a team the same size.

  But currently, the full force of Nega Nebulus, including the Petit Paquet group who had just joined, was a mere ten people. Even if they did attempt the attack with the whole Legion, the defending side would likely still have more members. And they had to leave at least three people for the defense of Suginami, which meant only seven could make the trip to Minato.

  At the meeting the previous day, Kuroyukihime had insisted petulantly that she would go, but everyone else frantically worked to dissuade her and somehow managed to get her to stand down. If in the worst case, the White King herself happened to be leading the Oscillatory defense team, the Territories would suddenly turn into a final battle of king vs. king.

  Kuroyukihime insisted that since no Burst Points were transferred to her in the Territories, the level-nine sudden-death rule also wouldn’t apply. But without any definite information on this front, they couldn’t expose their Legion Master to the risk of sudden death. Haruyuki had already been incredibly anxious in Sunday’s Battle Royale with Great Wall. With the clearly hostile White King as her opponent, they needed Kuroyukihime to be careful with anything and everything on Saturday.

  The one who finally persuaded her was, surprisingly, Chocolat Puppeter, aka Shihoko Nago, taking part in a meeting in the real world for the first time. She didn’t sound as formally girlish in the real; in fact, she projected the image of being a serious, polite girl. She stared at Kuroyukihime as if dazzled when she had said, “It’s very painful and sad to have that bond severed when your heart is connected to someone. It’s probably the saddest thing that can happen in the Accelerated World. We joined Nega Nebulus because we don’t want anyone else to have to go through that again. I understand that the battle on Saturday is very important. But I think what’s even more important is that everyone here now can continue being Burst Linkers forever.”

  Shihoko had experienced the loss of this bond with Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper, who were also her close friends in the real, and her words had a gravity that forced Kuroyukihime to assent. Although it might also have been the fact that the three homemade cakes the girls brought for everyone were surprisingly delicious.

  “Cooking club, huh? Lucky. They get to make cakes like that at school and eat them every day, I guess,” he muttered, reflecting on the rich flavor of the carob-chocolate gâteau he had taken an enormous liking to, then shook his head to get back on track. Before he knew it, he had walked almost to the intersection of Shinoume Highway and Kannana Street. Normally, he’d turn left there to go home, but in order to complete the mission he’d been given, he had to cross Kannana and get on a bus.

  “Fwoo…Haah…” He took a few deep breaths while he waited for the light to change to relieve even a tiny bit of the pressure he felt.

  UI> YOU CAN DO IT!

  A chat window jumped up in his field of view, and Haruyuki jumped.

  “Waah?!” He whirled around to find the smiling face of the super president whom he’d parted with when he left school fifteen minutes earlier, Utai Shinomiya. “Sh-Shinomiya, why?! Didn’t you go home?!”

  Stunned, he blinked in rapid succession, but no matter how he looked at it, the
Utai there in her snow-white dress-type uniform with the brown backpack over her shoulders was the real deal. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on the forehead beneath her neatly arranged bangs, but that wasn’t because she was an AR image; rather, it was the difference in their mental training.

  The fingers of her small hands flashed, and words scrolled through his chat window. UI> YOU SEEMED ANXIOUS, ARITA, SO I LEFT MY THINGS AT A RENTAL LOCKER AT SHIN–KOENJI STATION AND CAME AFTER YOU.

  “Huh? So you were behind me the whole time?”

  UI> I OVERHEARD PERFECTLY WHEN YOU WERE TALKING TO YOURSELF BEFORE. YOU AREN’T THINKING ABOUT QUITTING THE ANIMAL CARE CLUB TO JOIN THE COOKING CLUB, ARE YOU?

  Utai pursed her lips adorably.

  “I—I wasn’t. Not at all!” He hurriedly shook his head. “Nothing like that! It’s just like…Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you. And your house is in the opposite direction. You came out of your way to see me off…”

  Now Utai was the one who was surprised. UI> I’M NOT SEEING YOU OFF, THOUGH. I WOULDN’T HAVE LEFT MY THINGS IN A LOCKER JUST FOR THAT. I’M COMING WITH YOU, OF COURSE!

  “Whoa!” All Haruyuki could do was cry out once more.

  After they crossed Kannana, got on the EV bus, and sat down next to each other in a two-person seat, Haruyuki let out a sigh. The air-conditioning in the bus was weak, but compared with outside, where the temperature soared past thirty degrees, it was heavenly. Around the time he finally stopped sweating, he had a sudden thought.

  “That reminds me. There’s no air conditioner in the animal hutch at Umesato. Is Hoo going to be okay in the heat?”

  UI> HE’S A NORTHERN WHITE-FACED OWL, SO HE CAN DEAL QUITE WELL WITH HEAT, BUT WE WILL NEED A HEATER IN THE WINTER. LET’S TALK WITH SACCHI ABOUT PUTTING SOME SOLAR PANELS ON THE HUTCH OR MOVING HIM SOMEWHERE FOR THE WINTER.