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  But Kuroyukihime didn’t press him about it. Although the words “something’s wrong” were dangerously close to leaving her mouth, she desperately restrained herself. The fact that he wasn’t saying anything about it himself meant that he was trying to take care of the issue on his own. If, hypothetically, he had asked for help, she would have immediately made up a reason to fly back from Okinawa, but right now was still a time to trust him, her sole child, and let him handle it.

  She had decided this inwardly, but that didn’t mean she could forget her unease. She pushed back the sense of crisis weighing heavily on her shoulders and murmured to herself, Fight hard, Haruyuki. I will also do what I should as a Burst Linker here in this land.

  “What I should do” was, at any rate, the mission requested of her by the two Okinawan girls who had abruptly contacted her the day before, but she still had no idea what the details were. They had told her there was some kind of trouble in the Accelerated World in this area, and that they wanted her to meet their master in connection with that. And although she had agreed to it, when she thought about it, Kuroyukihime was leaving Henoko the following morning for far-off Yoron Island. It was fine as long as this was a problem that could resolved before then. At any rate, she would hear everything from this “master.”

  She sat up, took off her sunglasses, and spoke to her friend who had her eyes closed in the neighboring deck chair. “Megumi?”

  Megumi opened her eyes and cocked her head slightly.

  Kuroyukihime dipped her head. “I really am sorry about yesterday. Today, I’m definitely going to get you a proper souvenir. I am going to walk from one end of the shopping street to the other and find the perfect present for you.”

  Megumi blinked rapidly and moved to open her mouth. But she shut it again, took a deep breath, and nodded with a broad grin.

  “’Kay. I’m looking forward to it, Hime.”

  After lazing around on the beach until two o’clock, Kuroyukihime left Megumi and headed back to the hotel first.

  Her meeting with Ruka and Mana was at three PM in the same café as the day before. It was painful to use buying Megumi a surprise present as an excuse for going off by herself, but she couldn’t exactly bring her along. Hiding an ever-increasing number of things from real-world friends was one of the many curses on the Burst Linker’s head. But such was the price of the power of acceleration. The BB program takes as much as it gives—or so the veteran Linkers often said, but Kuroyukihime thought that the balance in the end might be in the red.

  Because someday, when you used up all your points and caused Brain Burst to force an uninstall, all you were left with was an enormous sense of loss and a hollow reality. There was a terrifying rumor in the Accelerated World that the banished Burst Linkers lost all memories connected with Brain Burst, but if that was true, she couldn’t not think that it would be as much of a blessing as it would be a punishment.

  Letting these thoughts race through her mind, Kuroyukihime changed from her swimsuit to her street clothes, and once she stepped outside of the hotel, she stopped for a moment to soak up sunlight so bright that it was hard to believe it was April.

  “Okay!” she shouted quietly, to change gears, and set out for the front gate at a brisk pace. It was still only 2:10; she had plenty of time to keep her promise to Megumi. Don’t get so involved in the Accelerated World that you neglect the real world—that was the first rule of the Legion Nega Nebulus.

  The short heels of her mules steady on the brick paving, Kuroyukihime hurried into the shopping district adjacent to the resort.

  Carefully tucking away in her tote bag the souvenir she had taken forty minutes to select, Kuroyukihime approached Sabani and flinched involuntarily at the loud voice that rained down on her from the patio.

  “Heeeey! Siiiiis! Over here!”

  When she looked, Ruka Asato (aka Lagoon Dolphin), with whom she had battled the previous day, and her child, Coral Merrow (aka Mana Itosu), were at a table, waving at her wildly. That day, they were both in sailor-style clothes, the uniform of a junior high school. Now that she thought about it, it was the middle of a weekday afternoon. To make it in time for a rendezvous thirty minutes earlier than the previous day, they would have had to come straight from school.

  She had absolutely no complaints about that, but on the shopping street full of tourists—more than a few of them foreigners—the snowy white sailor uniforms stood out even more. As a Burst Linker sneaking through the world, Kuroyukihime made herself smaller as she trotted up onto the patio and sat down, breathing a sigh of relief as she did. She ordered guava juice that day, which arrived quickly, and after taking a sip, she looked again at the girls before her.

  They had said that Ruka was in eighth grade while Mana was in seventh, and that they were three months apart in age, so Ruka had been born first, and Mana later. Both of them should have been somewhere around thirteen years old, but she couldn’t help thinking that they somehow looked a little younger than that. Normally, Burst Linkers tended to look older than their actual age, and that tendency was marked in higher-level players. There had to be a reason why these two, magnificent veterans at levels four and five, had not a trace of this about them.

  These thoughts flitting through her mind, Kuroyukihime stared absently as Ruka and Mana pulled worn Neurolinkers from their school bags and affixed them on their deeply tanned necks. Those necks had unexpectedly sharp “Linker tans,” but the students at the Okinawan school they visited in the morning had said that VR lessons had been introduced in only a very few public schools in Naha. Which meant that these girls had been wearing Neurolinkers from the time they were little for a reason other than education.

  “All right, then, Sister. We’re going up today,” Mana said abruptly, lifting her face, and Kuroyukihime furrowed her brow with a Hmm? The pair didn’t seem to notice as they took a deep breath.

  “Here we go! Three, two, one! Unlimited Bu—”

  Pft! Spitting out a bit of her second sip of guava juice, Kuroyukihime hurriedly reached out her hands to slap them over the girls’ mouths.

  “W-wait. Wait, wait, wait!”

  “Nnph nnph?!”

  “You two aren’t actually going to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field from here, are you?!”

  “Mmph mmph!”

  “Y-you can’t! That is definitely not okay!! Doing something like that without a disconnection safety, what are you going to do if you can’t make it to a portal?!”

  “M-mmph…mmph mmph…”

  Here, their faces grew slightly paler, so she nervously removed her hands. Ruka and Mana took a deep breath, and after confirming that they weren’t going to shout the command a second time, Kuroyukihime stood up. She went around behind them and grabbed on to the collars of their sailor uniforms before saying in her scariest voice, “I will choose the dive location. No complaints, yes?”

  Dangling like kittens, the girls shook their heads vigorously from side to side.

  Then Kuroyukihime led—or rather dragged—Ruka and Mana to the full-dive space set up in the resort hotel where she was staying. The safest thing would have been to use her room on the seventh floor, but if it got out that she had brought guests in, both the school and the hotel would have been angry with her.

  Apparently, although both girls saw the hotel from the outside on a daily basis, they had never been inside, and they stared in awe at the chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings and the interior of the cafeteria on the first floor. Ruka and Mana both seemed to want to take in more of the sights, but Kuroyukihime pushed their backs, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and paid the additional fee for the two of them at the reception for the full-dive space, which looked like an expensive café at first glance. Kuroyukihime was a guest of the hotel, so it was free for her to use.

  Shoved into a four-person booth, the junior high girls were still muttering things like “Tehgeh [whatever], fine” and “No worries. Push comes to shove, the staff would’ve yanked our Neurol
inkers off,” but faced with what the boy Arita secretly called the “ultimate cool Kuroyukihime smile” (which of course she knew about), they quickly fell quiet.

  Kuroyukihime took three XSB cables from the rack provided and inserted them one after another into the router for wired connections built into the low table in front of the sofa. After making the two girls turn off their wireless global connection, she pushed the plugs on the opposite ends of the wired connectors in, whether they liked it or not.

  When they were connected, Ruka and Mana blushed, saying “Oh!” and “Ooh!” but since she begrudged the time to comment on that, she let it pass and set the automatic disconnection timer on the router for five minutes later. Even still, the time inside until the safety activated was five thousand minutes—just over eighty-three hours would pass. If the problem was something that couldn’t be resolved with that much time, then the assistance of Kuroyukihime alone was not enough to begin with.

  Finally, she connected the last XSB cable to her own Neurolinker, and turned to the girls sitting across from her. “Listen. I will meet your master as promised, but I can’t make any guarantees about what will happen after that. In the worst case, we may end up fighting. Make sure you’re ready for that.”

  “Okay!” The pair energetically raised their hands together, so even as she worried about whether or not they really understood, Kuroyukihime opened her mouth to begin the countdown.

  “Now then, we dive on the count of five. Five, four, three—”

  “Oh! Sis, wait!” Ruka said suddenly, sounding surprised, and this time, it was her covering Kuroyukihime’s mouth.

  “Wh-what?” She turned her head, and saw that Ruka had a finger to her lips as she indicated with her eyes Mana sitting to her left.

  The girl, who until a few seconds earlier had been full of energy waiting for the dive timing, had changed dramatically. Hair pulled back into a swinging ponytail, she was slowly moving her upper body back and forth. It was hard to tell where her hazily clouded eyes were looking, and it sounded like she was saying something, but extremely quietly. Kuroyukihime couldn’t catch what it was.

  “Wh-what’s wrong?” Kuroyukihime leaned forward.

  Ruka restrained her again and brought her face closer. “Kandahlee…Her Yuta blood’s coming out.”

  As Kuroyukihime watched over the girl, dumbfounded and dubious, Mana’s unusual behavior stopped as abruptly as it had started. She blinked several times, and when she turned her face to the right, the expression on it had returned to normal. The girl looked at Kuroyukihime with eyes a color reminiscent of the depths of the ocean, and said innocently, “Sister, one more!”

  “…One more what?”

  “This. This string.” She grabbed on to the XSB cable connecting her Neurolinker to the router.

  Unconsciously, Kuroyukihime looked around the small booth, but there was no one there, of course, besides the three of them. The door was locked with Kuroyukihime’s electronic key, so no one else should have been able to come inside.

  But in Mana’s eyes was a conviction she could not deny. When she reached out a hand as if to guide Kuroyukihime, the older girl took the fourth XSB cable from the rack next to the sofa and plugged one terminal into the router. With this, both cables and all connectors were used.

  “So where is this plug going?”

  At the question, Mana smiled. “Please just leave it there!”

  She had no idea what was going on, but as a practical issue, there was nothing to do but that. Kuroyukihime set the plug on the table, and after puzzling over it one final time, she opened her mouth again. “Now, then. This time for sure, we go on the count of five.”

  She waited for Ruka and Mana to nod, and then began the countdown. “Five, four, three, two, one. Unlimited Burst!”

  The incantation to open the door to the true Accelerated World, the Unlimited Neutral Field, spilled from three sets of lips. Enveloped in a rainbow of light to cut her consciousness free of reality and carry it away, Kuroyukihime murmured, “My, my,” to herself.

  In the twenty-three wards of Tokyo, she was the Black King Black Lotus, known to all as the destroyer of order, the betrayer of the Six Kings, but since the previous day, these two girls had been yanking her around. At the same time, however, there was something refreshing and nostalgic about this feeling. Almost like those days long, long ago, right after she first became a Burst Linker, when she was yanked around here and there, wherever the pioneers told her.

  Carried away by nostalgia, Kuroyukihime didn’t realize that her guard, normally so solid, had slackened as she lost herself in leading the girls. Specifically, she hadn’t noticed a pair of eyes staring hard at her own back from behind a pillar as she led the two girls into the dive space.

  The owner of those eyes stepped out from the shadows immediately after they entered the booth and started walking briskly toward the dive space.

  7

  Hovering out of the resort hotel, Kuroyukihime looked back through the goggles of her duel avatar at the half-crumbling building. The bared steel frame was rusted red, and the concrete worn and cracked, but the overall structure and terrain were basically a perfect copy of the original hotel. Even for Okinawa, Henoko was not a large town, but it seemed that the social camera net reached every corner even here. Which meant, in other words, that the Unlimited Neutral Field existed unbroken from Tokyo sixteen hundred kilometers away all the way to this place.

  Feeling once more the expansiveness of the Accelerated World, Kuroyukihime surveyed again the desolate scene around her. “A Weathered stage, then.”

  This time, Lagoon Dolphin and Coral Merrow, standing to the rear, didn’t correct her.

  The names given to the various attributes of the duel field—Century End, Demon City, Purgatory—were not originally set by the BB system. The early Burst Linkers thought up fitting names from the appearance of the field, and they stuck. With the Ancient Castle of the previous day as well, their master had likely told them the name, but Okinawan natives Ruka and Mana had replaced it with Okinawan Fortress, a phrase their ears were more accustomed to.

  Given that, she imagined that the Sacred Ground stage would be Nirai Kanai, the Okinawan paradise, but the conversation promised to be long if she took the trouble to confirm, so Kuroyukihime simply turned around again and said, “Where is your master, then?”

  “This way!” Dolphin shouted, enthusiastic as always, and turned around. The blue avatar, short finlike protrusions all over the streamlined armor, started running, and the coral avatar with fins of a similar design, but longer and more delicate, chased after her with a “Wait up!”

  In the real world, the courtyard of the hotel had a variant of cockspur coral trees, red flowers blooming, but at the moment, as with the hotel itself, there was nothing there but concrete crumbling and the rusted steel frame, a remarkably dreary scene. The ground was covered in a haze of reddish-brown sand, and from time to time, the wind swept it up into the air in a cloud of dust, but the two girls seemed to pay that no mind as they ran excitedly. Kuroyukihime leaned forward slightly and accelerated her hovering to a run.

  After they moved along the cracked road for a few minutes, a cluster of small buildings came into view ahead of them. In the real world, this was probably the street where Kuroyukihime and Megumi had gone shopping. But, of course, there were no tourists nor any store clerks inviting them inside. Only the dry wind blew through buildings with rusting steel frames exposed.

  Or not.

  In the center of the shopping street, perhaps in the same position as Sabani, was a lone store with a seedy neon sign flashing. The letters blinked on and off irregularly, in a strange font that might have spelled out BAR.

  “Oh-ho, a shop in a place like this,” Kuroyukihime murmured unconsciously to herself.

  Shops were the so-called NPC stores that dotted the Unlimited Neutral Field. There were all sorts of shops, and you could buy everything from special-effect card items to Enhanced Armaments, clothing, f
ood and drink, and even houses. In Tokyo, they were mainly clustered in the shopping districts of Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, and Akihabara, but some were also doing business plopped down in the middle of nowhere. There were some Burst Linkers who specialized in finding—or rather made it their hobby to find—these “hidden shops,” but even they certainly wouldn’t come all the way out to Henoko in far-flung Okinawa.

  As they approached the shop, she saw that the sign did say BAR, so it was probably a drinking spot. In the real world, this was the sort of place a middle schooler couldn’t even go into, much less place an order at, but Dolphin and Merrow charged into the establishment without the slightest hesitation, calling out loudly, “Master! Haitai! [Hello!]”

  A few generous seconds later, a somewhat lifeless male voice came from inside. “Yeah…Haitai…”

  “Come on! That’s wrong! Boys say haisai!” Ruka corrected.

  “Y-yeah…Haisaaai…”

  Kuroyukihime heard the voice correct itself, and cocked her head doubtfully. She stopped in front of the store and checked on the situation inside from beyond the crumbling walls.

  “Aaah, you’ve already drunk this much in the middle of the day. This is the only thing about you that’s totally Uchina ohji, you know,” Mana said, exasperated.

  “Not ohji, right…I’m still a tenth-grade yaibiin,” came the grumbled response. “Barkeep, gimme another three-hundred-year-old awamori!”

  There was an unintelligible electronic noise in response, and then a completely metallic robot walked jerkily out from behind the counter. This machine, so falsely similar in design to a duel avatar, was the NPC shop clerk, known as a “drone.” Like the Enemies, they were residents of this world, making the BB system go.