The Binary Stars of Destiny Read online

  Thud.

  Takumu took another step forward and looked down on Haruyuki, a mere two meters away. “The rest is up to you, Haru. Even if I do end up losing all my points fighting the people behind this, before my memory’s cut out, I’ll tell you whatever I’ve learned, somehow. So you have to go and save this world. I know you can…You’re the only one who can. I believe that.”

  “…Taku.” Haruyuki managed to call his friend’s name in a voice almost inaudible. He couldn’t get out any other words of substance.

  Resolve.

  Right now, the fact that Takumu was able to resist the terrifying control of the ISS kit—albeit just barely—was no doubt because of the massive boulder that was his own resolve. He had already decided. On the place of his own death. On his own final battle.

  But.

  The source of that resolve was despair at himself. The fact that he lost to the temptation of the ISS kit. The fact that he slaughtered the PK group Supernova Remnant in his rage. The fact that he set up the backdoor program in Chiyuri and attacked Kuroyukihime. And the fact that a long time ago, he had broken the circle of three childhood friends. He had made up his mind that these sins were absolutely unforgivable and changed that despair into resolve to face his final battle.

  “I can’t. Let you go,” Haruyuki said, his voice shaking like a child trying to keep from weeping. “There’s absolutely no way I’m going to just say, ‘Got it. Leave the rest to me.’ I can’t leave you to sacrifice yourself and still go on being a Burst Linker myself.”

  “Heh-heh. Stubborn right down to the bone.” Takumu chuckled, smiling as if he were truly happy. “I guess I wanted to hear you say that, so I forced you into this direct duel…but it’s enough already. Thanks, Haru. Your feelings give me energy. I feel like I can stay myself a little bit longer. So, okay. I guess it’s about time we finished this.”

  He raised his sturdy left hand and rolled his fingers in from the littlest up to his thumb. The concentrated black aura made even the stage itself shake faintly.

  As if in response, Haruyuki faced him, again tightly clenching the fist covered in silver Armament. He lifted his chin and nodded slowly. “Yeah. We’ve already said everything we can say in words.”

  Right.

  If they didn’t meet fist with fist, nothing would start, and nothing would end, either. They had both dived into this final battle stage to do exactly that; Brain Burst existed for only this purpose.

  Haruyuki mustered up every ounce of willpower his duel avatar had, body now missing both left arm and wing, and concentrated it in his right fist. The silver overlay ripped through the pulsating, wild darkness and pushed it back.

  He had managed to summon just one arm of the Destiny, theta of the Seven Arcs, which should have offered nowhere near the total performance of the Disaster. This Enhanced Armament had neither the vast wealth of battle data built up over long years nor a will inscribed with the rage and hatred of those who had worn the armor in the past.

  But the Destiny had exactly one thing the Disaster did not.

  Hope. A single shining hope, glittering like a star, protected for many long years by the mysterious golden-yellow girl avatar lodged in one corner of the armor. He still didn’t know who she was, why her consciousness lived in the armor, or what she wanted, but that faint warmth gave Haruyuki courage. It didn’t spur him into battle like the Disaster had, but rather supported and encouraged him.

  Now that I think about it, someone’s always been there to support me. During the Hospital Battle right at the start, in the fight after that against the fifth Chrome Disaster, the fight against Dusk Taker, the race at Hermes’ Cord, the God Suzaku protecting the gate…Kuroyukihime, Chiyu, Master Raker, Ash, Niko, Pard, Mei, and of course Taku—they were always there to protect me, to cheer me on. There’s basically not a single fight I’ve won on my own.

  But that’s okay. Because those connections…those bonds are the true power of a Burst Linker. I want Taku to know that. I want him to understand there are a ton of people besides me who are thinking about him, who need him.

  So please lend me the strength to do that.

  He could hear no answering voice to this cry in his heart. But he felt heat thump to life in the center of his fist, and then an even more dazzling white light gushed out.

  Takumu slowly drew back his left fist and lowered his stance.

  Haruyuki lifted his right hand and sharply pointed his fingers.

  As the two spoke their technique names simultaneously, their voices held a quiet resolve, as though trying to console each other.

  “Dark Blow.”

  “Laser Sword.”

  The instant the ink-dark and silver-white attack trajectories crossed each other, their current battleground of B wing followed in the steps of the already destroyed A wing, to be transformed into innumerable clumps that exploded in all directions.

  When Takumu had hit him with the same Incarnate technique minutes earlier, Haruyuki had been sent flying dozens of meters backward, unable to resist the enormous force of impact for even a second. He should have been smashed to bits right then and there.

  But this time, although the Dark Blow did indeed at first smash into him, Haruyuki braced himself and pushed back on Takumu’s fist, however slightly. Outstretched arms—separated by a mere ten centimeters—struggled for supremacy, sparks shooting from the gap between them as light and dark fought with surprising ferocity.

  The divine protection of the Destiny Arc was awe-inspiring. Its defense alone was even more powerful than the Disaster, which had shifted a great deal of its potential to offense.

  But there was no point in simply sitting here and struggling against each other like this. Haruyuki had to pierce the storm of raging darkness and tell Takumu. He had to tell him that there was not a single crime for which he could not be forgiven. That everyone in the Legion needed him. And that no matter how deep in the dark night he might be, if he looked up at the sky, there would always be the light of the stars shining on the path ahead.

  Reach him.

  Reach him!!

  Body and soul, Haruyuki prayed—and thereby gave form to his will.

  Rrrrring! A crisp echo, like a bell ringing, joined his prayer. Overlay, pure and white, spread out across the silver armor that covered his right arm. At the same time, from the tips of his fingers, his sword of light began to grow longer, bit by bit by bit.

  Haruyuki’s Laser Sword was a range-expansion Incarnate technique. The source of its power was the desire to reach out to a place that was not normally reachable. For a long time, Haruyuki thought this meant he wanted to run away from things. Run away from his ugly, cowering self. Run away from the kids who bullied that self. Run away from his mother’s gaze, which looked at him like he was just another hassle in her life. Run away from the memory of his father claiming not to want him. Run, run, stretch out this hand to some place where he wasn’t…

  But a place where he wasn’t didn’t exist. Wherever he might try to go, he would be there. That hand reaching out would always be connected to his own self. So reaching out his hand was an active gesture, one that tied him to what he wished to grasp.

  Which is why this silver light has to connect me and Taku. It will bring my feelings to him, my heart. It will overwrite the digital defense and attack power calculations of the Brain Burst system and make a tiny miracle happen.

  Reach…him…!

  The cry from Haruyuki’s heart rang out across the field with a powerful echo.

  His pure, glittering silver light melted the superconcentrated darkness, pierced it, and pushed forward bit by bit. It was no longer a sword. It was Haruyuki’s own flesh-and-blood arm reaching out from Silver Crow’s.

  Taku!! I need you…!!

  Beyond the end of his outstretched arm, he suddenly saw something on the other side of the pitch-black darkness.

  A pale left hand, just like his own, with no armor of any kind. Takumu’s hand, fingers callused from swinging a swor
d every day. The fingers, curled up into a tight ball, twitched. Slowly, tentatively, they opened up, then pulled back, shaking. But they reached out hesitantly once more and moved toward Haruyuki’s hand.

  At that moment.

  Countless spikes of light the color of dark blood exploded between them.

  “Ngh?!” Pulled from the vision guiding the imagination circuit and back into the duel field, Haruyuki saw an unexpected sight.

  The Pile Driver of Cyan Pile’s right arm was held up before his chest, as the eyeball-shaped ISS kit parasitizing the surface opened its eye so wide it threatened to fall out. It bathed them in concentrated light the shade of fresh blood. Black tissue like blood vessels reached out from around the eyeball and came together about ten centimeters away to form a round protuberance.

  The lump immediately grew to the same size as the eyeball next to it, and then the surface of the black lump split lengthwise. One piece went upward, the other downward, and then the eyelids opened to reveal another eyeball.

  On the surface of Takumu’s arm, the two adjacent eyeballs of the ISS kit gazed at Haruyuki from extremely close range. In them, Haruyuki felt the definite will of someone else. A bottomless hunger. The urge to destroy. The craving to multiply. And hatred.

  “Wh-why—!” Takumu cried out, still struggling with Haruyuki’s Incarnate with his left fist. Apparently he hadn’t expected anything like this, either. “I didn’t give the command! So why did a clone…?!”

  Haruyuki grasped the meaning of this at basically the same time as ten—or maybe more—thin black tentacles stretched out from around the second eyeball to plunge into Silver Crow’s chest.

  Cold.

  No, hot.

  Abnormal signals raced through his entire nervous system. It was almost as if ice water had been injected directly into his blood vessels with a needle. The herd of capillaries, strangely like microwires, drove deeper and deeper into his body. They wrapped around his heart, tangled through his lungs, climbed up his spine, and entered his head.

  Haruyuki couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak.

  And although the many tentacles had pierced deep into the chest of his avatar, his HP gauge, with only a few percent remaining, did not decrease a single dot. But that itself showed the abnormality of the phenomenon. The silver overlay flowing from his right arm shuddered and flickered; the Laser Sword that had extended from there also melted and crumbled away like snow flurries.

  Normally, the equilibrium between their two Incarnates would have been destroyed, and Cyan Pile’s Dark Blow would have easily dispatched Silver Crow.

  However, that did not happen. As Haruyuki’s Incarnate flickered, Takumu pulled back his left hand and screamed, “Don’t you touch Haruuuuuuuu!!”

  Veiled in the obsidian aura, he used his left hand to grab hold of the bundle of black wires that had come out of his own right arm and were piercing Haruyuki’s chest. He twisted his entire body in an effort to rip them out, yanking as hard as he could. But the wires shuddered like some kind of living creature and fought to keep from being removed.

  Paralyzed, unable to move a muscle, Haruyuki met Takumu’s eyes as his friend yanked and tugged at the black tentacles.

  Takumu smiled thinly. Or that’s what it felt like. In that smile was none of the emptiness, the deep resignation of the other smiles he had given Haruyuki any number of times over the course of the fight. It was the reliable, warm smile that had always been there when Haruyuki looked to his side during their days of fighting alongside each other in their Legion.

  Cyan Pile put the barrel of his Pile Driver against his own throat.

  “…T-Taku…,” Haruyuki struggled to say.

  But at that exact moment, Takumu firmly called out the technique name: “Lightning Cyan Spark!!”

  From the gap between the thick armor and the barrel glued to it, a pale light jetted out. Then, a beam of lightning shot up from the nape of Cyan Pile’s neck, higher and higher into the sky of the Scorched Earth stage.

  Having launched his special attack into the vital spot of his own avatar, Takumu staggered backward and caught himself just as he was about to fall. His HP gauge, at nearly 40 percent before the self-inflicted blow, was dyed entirely red and dropped precipitously from the right side until it hit zero.

  The movement of the black fibers, digging deep into Haruyuki’s body, very close to reaching the center of his head, stopped. They wilted and slid out of his chest before melting into the air and disappearing.

  The second eyeball also closed its lids, looked vexed somehow, and disappeared as if absorbed into the first.

  Standing there, dumbfounded, Haruyuki’s ears picked up his friend’s soft whisper. “…Thank goodness…”

  Leaving just those two words, Cyan Pile and his enormous blue body, black aura completely gone, shattered into shards of glass and scattered in all directions.

  Thus Haruyuki was left alone in the center of an enormous crater in the Scorched Earth stage, the area scarred and burned. The silver Enhanced Armament was released, dissembling into the air off his right arm.

  As if to escape the flaming proclamation YOU WIN! displayed in the center of his field of view, Haruyuki looked up at the darkening evening sky.

  A vortex of feeling he couldn’t put a name to filled his chest and spilled out from both eyes, blurring the reddish purple of the sky. The duel was over, and until the moment he was pulled out of the Accelerated World, Haruyuki simply stood there, the shoulders of his avatar shaking quietly.

  The instant he returned to the real world and opened his eyes, Haruyuki felt a single drop of water bounce off his cheek. It was the tear Takumu had shed immediately before the direct duel started.

  Having burst out at roughly the same time, Takumu was still holding down Haruyuki’s shoulder with his left hand, pinning him flat on the bed, while gripping the direct cable with his right, both eyes open wide. On the other side of his glasses, new droplets were born and dripped down onto the lenses.

  “…I…” Takumu’s lips trembled slightly as a hoarse voice slid out of his throat. But instead of saying anything further, he slowly lowered his body and fell over to Haruyuki’s right with a thud.

  Silent for a while, the two friends lay side by side on the wide single bed, at a diagonal. Their eyes rested on an A2-size poster, printed on thin polyfilm and plastered to the ceiling of Takumu’s room.

  It featured an adult kendo player. Judging from the fact that there was no text of any kind on it, it was probably a photo Takumu had found and printed out himself. The composition had the player positioned at a diagonal, on the verge of launching a mask strike, the tip of the bamboo shinai sword plainly blurred. It was nothing more than a 2-D photo, but it held an intensity great enough to rouse passion just by viewing it.

  “Is that player your teacher? An older student?” Haruyuki asked cautiously in neurospeak, through the direct cable that still connected their Neurolinkers.

  After a while, a quiet reply came back to him. “No. He was a kendo player fifty years ago.”

  “So then…he’s someone you want to be like?”

  “…It’s more like…respect, maybe? I mean, it’s ridiculous to think I could be like him. In the nineteen nineties, he won the national kendo championships six times. And that record hasn’t been broken even now, fifty years later.”

  “So…what’s the second-place record?”

  “Three times. And even that is a seriously nice piece of work.”

  In which case, the player in the photo was the best kendo practitioner in real-world Japan—no, in the entire real world. The instant the thought crossed his mind, Haruyuki murmured, “Wonder what it’s like to be that strong. Like maybe you wouldn’t worry about stuff or not knowing what to do, you know?”

  “In an interview he did after he retired from competition, when he was working as an instructor, he said, ‘I haven’t gotten a hold on anything yet. I’m still dawdling at the entrance of a pitch-black tunnel.’”

&nbs
p; “Huh…Really?” Haruyuki sighed unconsciously before voicing his thoughts as they came. “But, like, if it’s pitch-black, how can you tell if it’s the entrance or not? Maybe the exit’s just up ahead.”

  He paused for a second before continuing. “It’s not actually ridiculous to compare yourself to him. I-I’ve thought that, too, so many times—that I’m in the middle of a tunnel without an exit. But there was an exit. There always was. And the next tunnel will…come along again soon, but…even still…”

  Earnestly fumbling for words, Haruyuki turned his face to the left and looked at Takumu’s profile, less than a meter away. Eyes still blurred by tiny droplets, the frames of his glasses cutting across his pale cheeks, he stared intently at the poster on the ceiling.

  Haruyuki steadied his resolve and opened his mouth to speak the heart of the matter in his real voice. “Taku, before, you stopped your Incarnate attack—Dark Blow—for me. To save me, you resisted the ISS kit and used your special attack on yourself. That action shows your true nature—that’s what I believe. Even if you did accept the kit and use its dark power this one time…you cut down that temptation and made it out of the tunnel. That’s what I believe.”

  He couldn’t say the words before, out of fear that when the conversation was over, Takumu would stand up, say good-bye, and leave the room—to go and fight Magenta Scissor and the Acceleration Research Society.

  Even after Haruyuki closed his mouth, Takumu continued to stare silently up at the ceiling for a while.

  After ten seconds or so, his friend asked him an entirely unexpected question in his real voice. “Haru, yesterday, in the solo song presentation in music class, you sang ‘Wings Please,’ right?”

  “Uh, uh-huh.” Haruyuki nodded, perplexed.

  Takumu glanced at him, smiling faintly as he continued. “The teacher gave us a bunch of other choices. Why’d you pick that one? You’ve always hated that song.”