The End and the Beginning Page 2
Once more, he passed through the disturbing plrmp sensation and shot up above a cold horizon. The exit at his feet then disappeared without a trace, and he landed on a hard floor. He quickly sent his gaze racing around his environs to figure out exactly where he was.
He wasn’t outside, but rather in a fairly large room. The four walls, ceiling, and floor were made of marble characteristic of the Twilight stage. Two exits, before and behind him. There were no windows; the only light came from a few lamps set high up on the walls.
The room was deserted, with nothing between Haruyuki and the motionless black rectangular solid about ten meters away from him. Still on one knee, Haruyuki pressed against the floor, but his fingertips were pushed back by smooth stone. He had to assume that he’d been able to enter the shadow corridor at the intersection near Midtown because he’d hitched a ride with the activation of Vise’s ability.
The rectangular solid that was the transformed Vise suddenly split into two panels down the center. Those spun around, the pieces fissuring again and again until the ultrathin panels once more took on the human shape of the layered avatar.
Vise stood with his back to Haruyuki, a small F-type avatar in his arms. She was still unconscious, with her limbs hanging limply and no light in her eye lenses. Her crimson armor was cracked in places, no doubt damage from being forcibly closed in Vise’s panels. Tiny fragments peeled off and fell to the floor as though she were bleeding.
The instant he set eyes on the battered Niko, Haruyuki’s heart caught fire. Spurred on by the white-hot flames, he stood and shouted his enemy’s name. His voice bounced off the four walls and echoed deeply.
Black Vise—perhaps having noticed Haruyuki’s presence, or perhaps not—turned soundlessly and cocked his head slightly to one side. Although the collection of thin panels that was his head featured nothing resembling eyes or a mouth, a magnetic gaze came from among the gaps in the panels to caress Silver Crow’s metallic armor.
“Oh my, this is a surprise,” Black Vise said a second later in his low, soft voice, somehow similar to a teacher’s. “What would you be doing in a place like this, Crow?”
“I came after you, obviously!”
“Excuse me, that was a foolish question on my part. But I must know—did you capture me from Midtown Tower the instant I used my latent shadow that second time? You might be fast, but given the distance involved, you shouldn’t have been able to catch up with me. How on earth did you manage it?”
The utterly casual nature of the question very nearly sucked Haruyuki in, but he kept himself from answering. The new wings folded up on his back—the Metatron Wings—weren’t visible to Vise from where he was standing. He needed to keep any cards he held close to his chest.
“I could say the same. How’d you manage to ambush us?” he asked instead in a low, strained voice. “I mean, you alone is one thing, but Argon Array shouldn’t have been able to withstand a long ambush. Or can she decelerate, too?”
“If I answer that question, will you tell me your secret? Hmm? It would be my pleasure to continue our little conversation, but unfortunately, that is the one question I cannot answer. You’ll have to ask her yourself the next time you see her.”
“I’ll do that,” Haruyuki declared with a threatening step forward, “right after I take Rain back.”
Vise stepped back in turn and shrugged. “Mmm, so sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”
He glanced down at the crimson avatar in his arms.
“The second Red King is scheduled to kindly leave the Accelerated World today.”
At first, the meaning in Black Vise’s sinisterly smooth voice went right past Haruyuki. His mind went blank for an instant—and then was filled with pure rage. This emotion, a powerfully flammable gas, caught fire with a single small spark—or rather, exploded—and spurred Haruyuki toward merciless battle.
“You. Bastard,” he said, pushing a hoarse voice from his throat and feeling as though his armor itself was electrified. “There’s no way I’m letting you do that. The one who’s leaving is you, Black Vise. I’ll make sure you never get to play another of your dirty tricks!”
“Dirty tricks? How cruel. I’m doing the best that I can here, you know, just as our president tells me to. I believe you act under the same principle, do you not, Crow?”
“Don’t lump us together! The Black King would never make her Legion fight while she went off and hid somewhere!”
At this very moment, Kuroyukihime and the other members of Nega Nebulus were headed for the nearest portal to force Niko to burst out. Kuroyukihime would lead her team to strike down any obstacle that might appear, expending every effort to rescue their friend. She was nothing like the unseen and unnamed leader of the Acceleration Research Society.
And it wasn’t as though Haruyuki blindly followed the orders of his Legion master, either. He knew what Kuroyukihime ultimately wanted, and it was precisely because he hoped to go down the same path that he offered her his sword as a knight. More than anything, Haruyuki hadn’t chased after Vise because Kuroyukihime had ordered him to; he’d done it because he wanted to save his precious friend, Niko—and because he believed that everyone in Nega Nebulus shared this feeling.
Just barely managing to control his explosive emotions, Haruyuki took another step forward. Again, as if expecting this movement, the layered avatar retreated to maintain the distance between them.
The urge to leap forward and rip Niko from his arms only grew, but if Vise was trying to provoke Haruyuki, he wasn’t going to play along. The more time he could buy there, the greater the probability that Kuroyukihime and the others would succeed in forcing Niko to disconnect. And unfortunately, he couldn’t say he had a good chance of winning in hand-to-hand combat against Vise. Although the black avatar specialized in capture and escape, he was still a high ranker at level eight when all was said and done, and he was also presumed to be one of the oldest of the old hands, the Originators.
While reason and emotion battled inside Haruyuki, Vise laughed lazily, probably guessing at least some of the inner turmoil playing out before him. “Ha-ha-ha! Now that you mention it, that’s true. I haven’t seen the president for some time, either. But that doesn’t mean they’re simply thumb twiddling or some such. After all, it was the president who tamed that Legend-class Enemy you fought before.”
Haruyuki felt the Enhanced Armament on his back shudder sharply. He took a deep breath and once more suppressed the urge to spread those wings and charge. “But in the end, all that did was force us to fight Metatron. Sorry, but we smashed the tool your absent president used to tame it. You won’t be able to make an Enemy protect your base anymore,” he stated, remembering the silver crown that had dug into the head of the Archangel, which had been guarding—forced to guard—Midtown Tower.
Black Vise cocked his head slightly to one side before laughing quietly. “Heh-heh, I see. You still don’t understand, hmm? Crow, what you smashed— Whoops, that’s all the time we have for conversation, I believe.”
“What do I supposedly not understand?”
“You’ll know the answer soon enough. Yes, in about one second.”
“What are you—?”
It was when he moved toward Vise a third time:
He suddenly felt an icy chill on his back and instinctively leapt to the right. A sharp steel-colored flash poured down from behind him and smashed into the floor where he had been standing a mere instant earlier. Staggering backward because of the blast and the wind pressure, Haruyuki opened both eyes wide.
A single sword, so large as to be terrifying all on its own: one and a half times as long as the Impulse, the greatsword carried by the Blue King, and twice as wide. Naturally, the hand gripping the hilt was also large. The arm and shoulder wrapped in steely armor were unusually tough, and the head capped in a knight-style helmet was so high up, Haruyuki had to tilt his head back to see it. The avatar was taller than even Avocado Avoider, much less Cyan Pile.
 
; “Name yourself!” Haruyuki challenged, leaping back even farther. An attack in this situation meant it was probably a member of the Acceleration Research Society, but since every Society Burst Linker he’d encountered thus far had been without exception midsize or smaller, certainly a super-large avatar like this couldn’t be on their register—
Wait. That’s not it.
Bwwn! Haruyuki moved back all the way to the wall to avoid the blade as it sliced toward him horizontally—and finally noticed the silver crown wrapped around the horned helmet. Although its size was different, the design, with its countless, overlapping C-shaped hooks, was exactly the same as the one that had been pressed into Metatron’s head.
“It’s not a duel avatar…” Haruyuki’s voice was hoarse. “This one’s a tamed Enemy, too?”
“Exactly,” Black Vise readily assented, standing a little ways off. “And its status is Beast level. I must beg off battling solo, you see.” As he spoke in his drawl, Vise took one step back and then another. An entrance with no door popped open in the wall behind him.
Haruyuki couldn’t let the man get away now, but the knight Enemy was brandishing its blade once more, keeping him pinned in place.
“Rain! Wake up! Rain!!” Haruyuki shouted as he stared at the tip of the massive sword, but Niko’s eye lenses remained devoid of light. Since it was basically impossible to lose consciousness for long periods in the Accelerated World because of physical or attribute damage, Vise had probably pushed her into something like a Zero Fill state somehow, and Haruyuki didn’t know how to break her out of it. “Rain!!”
As if Haruyuki’s desperate cry was a trigger, the knight moved. It swung the massive sword in its right hand from top to bottom and then from left to right. Sparks jetted up from where the blade crashed into the floor, and the air it sliced through burned.
If Vise wasn’t lying when he said the knight was Beast class, then Haruyuki, at level five, might very well die instantly if he took a single blow from it. He didn’t know what would happen to Niko during the sixty minutes until he regenerated, and if the knight was always in this room, then Silver Crow might even end up in Unlimited EK.
Desperately dodging a series of blows, Haruyuki saw in the corner of his eye that Vise had finally reached the exit.
“Now then, I will take my leave of you here. I pray for your success in battle, Crow.”
Haruyuki made for Black Vise as the man melted into the darkness of the doorway, but the Enemy moved, swinging its sword around, and completely blocked the doorway with its massive body.
“Nngh!” Gritting his teeth, Haruyuki figured his only choice at this point was sink or swim—to charge past the Enemy to escape the room. He crouched down and was about to kick off the floor.
…No. Another voice murmured inside his head.
Precisely because he was in crisis mode, he relaxed, and his field of view expanded. Himself, the enemy, the battlefield: A close look at all these should tell him what he really needed to do.
Even the weakest Lesser was still far too difficult an Enemy for Haruyuki to defeat on his own. And the knight standing in his way now was equivalent to Beast class, far beyond even the Wild class. If he charged it in desperation, it was all too possible that the Enemy would catch him in a counterattack that killed him instantly. Still, fighting and defeating it was far more difficult than trying to slip past it.
However, this particular knight Enemy had a glaringly obvious weak point. This was, of course, the crown on its head. If the knight was tamed by it the way Metatron had been, all he had to do was land even one blow there to stop it from moving. While it was frozen, he could break free of the room and go after Vise.
The problem with this strategy was that, although the knight was of such massive bulk he needed to look up at it, the diameter of its head was much smaller than the seven meters of Metatron’s. And necessarily, the crown wrapped around that head was that much smaller as well—a mere five centimeters wide. Haruyuki would have to pinpoint a hard blow in that narrow range.
Since the knight was basically double the size of Silver Crow, a punch or a kick from the ground had no chance of reaching the crown. The idea of his long-distance Incarnate attack Laser Lance flickered to life in his mind, but he soon rejected it. The lance required a deeper imagination than Laser Sword and left him wide open pre- and post-activation. If, in the worst case, his aim was off, he would no doubt be hit with a counterattack. That said, it was still much riskier to try a direct physical attack on the head like in the fight against Metatron than to slip between the Enemy’s legs.
Haruyuki racked his brain, constantly in retreat to avoid the relentless slicing of the sword. There had to be something, some other way…
Unexpectedly, the wings on his back—not Crow’s original silver wings, but the white ones equipped above them—shivered once more. Almost as if they were trying to tell him something.
You…can do something?
Haruyuki didn’t hear a voice in response to the question in his mind, but he felt sure the Enhanced Armament Metatron Wings still had unknown power to reveal. The heat coming through on his back was the sign of the activation of an unknown ability. He deployed all four wings and dropped into a ready position.
Perhaps in response to Haruyuki’s action, here, for the first time, the armored knight let slip the characteristic, strange cry of the Enemies: “Rrooah…”
Blue-black eyes shone behind the narrow slit cut into the helmet. The Enemy gripped the massive sword with both hands and concentrated its strength in its thick arms.
“Rroooaaaaaaah!!” Roaring from the throat, it yanked its weapon into the air before swinging it, whistling, downward.
It took all of Haruyuki’s willpower to stand still and wait for the blow coming with a speed out of sync with the massive body. If he dodged with room to spare, as he had so far, he’d lose his chance to counter. He had to evade the sword with maximum speed and minimum motion.
In his super-accelerated awareness, he stared at the lethal blade rushing toward him and watched for an opportunity Riiiiiight…
“Now!!”
He took the Aerial Combo technique he’d spent so much time refining, added the force from kicking off the ground to the instantaneous thrust of his wings, and did a sliding dash a mere meter to the right. The massive chunk of steel slid by, whistling in his ear, and slammed into the marble floor, sending a galaxy of sparks shooting up to bounce crackling off Crow’s armor.
Haruyuki ignored the harmless heat-and-light effect and yanked his right arm back. He had absolutely no idea what kind of power the wings Metatron had given him would offer in this situation. All that came to him was a vague will, a voice telling him they could do something. But now that he was in the thick of it, he could only trust that voice and attack.
“Aaaaah!!” Haruyuki thrust his right fist out. In response to this, his upper right wing stretched up high. The thin wing, reminiscent of a sharp sword, bent in the air ninety degrees.
Shak! The wing sliced through the air and plunged ahead like lightning. The knight attempted to dodge by throwing its upper body back with unexpected agility, but the wing, now transformed into a ray of light, followed that movement, carving out a gentle arc to make a direct hit on the side of its helmet.
A dazzling light erupted, coloring Haruyuki’s field of view white, but he narrowed his eyes and watched as the silver crown, which was biting into the helmet, was severed by the wing/ultrathin blade—and then fell apart into pieces.
“One…blow?” he murmured hoarsely, marveling at the fearsome power, despite that it had been his own attack. When he was fighting Metatron, he had to hit the crown dozens of times before it was finally destroyed. Given the huge difference in size, the two crowns likely also differed in terms of strength. And the physical striking attack of his fists was no doubt quite different from the slicing attack of the blade, but even so, the wings exhibited a spectacular cutting power.
Awakening from his momentary sh
ock, Haruyuki hurriedly jumped back, but the knight remained frozen in an unnatural position. The rings that had formed the silver crown peeled away from the helmet one after another, fluttered to the floor, and vanished before the giant finally began to move sluggishly.
Even if he had released it from a tame state, Haruyuki recognized as a general principle that all Enemies were active against Burst Linkers. Metatron was an exceptional exception to that rule, lending Haruyuki its strength after judging that it “owed” him for releasing it from the tame state, and there was a strong possibility that the knight Enemy would attack him again. Haruyuki decided he needed to leave before that happened and go after Black Vise. He slipped by one side of the still-hazy Enemy, cut across the large floor, and flew into the exit Vise had passed through.
That turned into a long hallway stretching out to either side. There were no windows out there, either, just orange light flickering from a few lamps. Not more than a minute had passed since Vise had gotten away, but the hallway was empty as far as he could see.
“Nngh.” Haruyuki gritted his teeth. He had to get Niko back as soon as possible, but there were no clues to help him decide if he should go right or left. As he stood there in frustration, the Enemy behind him started to move.
Right or left— No, wait.
“Up!” Haruyuki cried out to himself, turning his eyes toward the high ceiling. He might be able to find Vise if he was in the sky, and he could also check where exactly he was in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Naturally, there was no window or chimney in the ceiling, but he figured he could probably smash through a few floors of a brittle Twilight-stage building.
Spreading all four wings, he dropped his hips and prepared to take off at maximum velocity.
Rrrrrrring! He heard the light chime of a bell, and the top pair of wings—the Enhanced Armament Metatron Wings—turned into particles of light and disappeared. Losing his balance, Haruyuki fell backward onto his bottom.