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  The slippers were from Christmas in fourth grade, when the three of them had bought three identical sets of slippers each and then given them to each other as presents. So it wasn’t just at Haruyuki’s house; a slipper squad of green elephants, blue bears, and pink rabbits were also at the ready at Chiyuri’s and Takumu’s.

  They had confirmed that the Kurashima squad was in good health two weeks earlier when they went over to apologize for the backdoor program incident. Takumu smiled again at Haruyuki’s words, and then, gracious as ever, pushed his feet into the tight-fitting slippers.

  “My mom just went and threw out the ones at my house without even asking. That was probably the last time I cried in front of my parents.”

  “She did? Then how about we go buy this slipper set again for Christmas this year?” Haruyuki said with a straight face.

  “Ha-ha!” Takumu briefly laughed out loud. “Size-wise, we’d have some trouble with these, you know. If we’re going to match, how about mugs or something?”

  “Ooh, Professor Mayuzumi, you do always say the stylish thing.”

  Takumu slapped him on the back at this, and he made a show of stumbling exaggeratedly as he opened the door to his bedroom.

  Haruyuki’s room was ten square meters, facing the southern balcony. The room had been used as a study by his father, who left ages ago after his parents got divorced, and the eastern wall was a built-in bookshelf, rarely seen these days. His father had kept his collection of last-century hardcover books there, but Haruyuki didn’t have a single such volume, of course.

  What occupied the expensive natural wood shelves instead was old gaming hardware from before full dives were practical and game packages full of the optical discs and memory cards for use with these various consoles. Since he had snuck in among these some games that were rated Z at the time—meaning they had an excess of gore or skin or both—he definitely could never let Chiyuri or Kuroyukihime into this room. Chiyuri was one thing, but no matter how he looked at it, there was never going to be a situation in which Kuroyukihime would need to visit the Arita house.

  Takumu approached the shelves with a fond look and traced out the spines of the game packages one by one with a fingertip. “On rainy days when we couldn’t play outside, we used to totally lose ourselves in these games, huh? Like this racing game…Oh! And this fighting game. Even though you were the best at pretty much all of them, for some reason, Chii was a total monster in this one. Even two against one, we could never manage to beat her.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. If she became a Burst Linker, she’d probably be super strong or something.”

  The pair looked at each other and grinned, as if to say, That’ll never happen.

  Naturally, three or four years earlier, back when they all had played together every day, visual field projection or full dives using the Neurolinker were the norm when it came to games. But the content rating standards for things like anime, comics, and games had grown increasingly strict over the years, so that the new games elementary school kids were allowed to play were, almost without exception, educational or puzzle types, or maybe, if they were lucky, pastoral graphic adventures. Even if a child asked an adult to buy a game card for them, the game wouldn’t load onto a child’s Neurolinker.

  Faced with this, Haruyuki took over his father’s account, still open on the Arita home server—although the money was his own, saved up by making the most of what his mother gave him to buy lunch—and the older-generation games he bought and collected through mail order had wonderful specifications: Crashes and explosions were par for the course in racing games; in a fighter, you could punch, you could kick, you had laser beams; and when it came to RPGs, you slaughtered innocent creatures and divested them of their money and items. Even if the screen was 2-D, even if his fingers on the controller started to hurt, it didn’t take much thought to see which was more fun—these old games, or the modern ones for kids.

  Naturally, now that he was in junior high, he could play any number of Neurolinker games rated twelve and up where you could shoot and slash. He had actually vented the stress of school in brutal FPSs or thrilling racing games until two or so weeks earlier. But the launch icons for those games were gone from his virtual desktop now. He’d gotten a taste of the ultimate fighting game, a game that used another reality as its setting. And now that he had experienced the overwhelming amount of information of that world, the tactics of the almost painful battles, he could never go back. He had absolutely no desire to go back.

  His thoughts finally caught up to his current critical situation, and Haruyuki sat heavily on the edge of his bed, heaving a sigh.

  Noticing his dejection, Takumu turned his back to the bookshelves and walked over. He set his bag down and gracefully sat next to Haruyuki.

  “Taku,” Haruyuki said, ever so timidly, glancing at his friend’s face in profile, “before, you said there was still a way to recover from this. Is there really a way other than fighting for my life in duels? I mean, I only have eight points left.”

  “Yeah, you’ll be fine. I’m not going to let you lose all your points.” Nodding deeply, Takumu asked, rather unexpectedly, “Haru, you have an XSB cable for directing, right?”

  “Huh? Uh, yeah.” He nodded and pulled out a bundled silver cord from the drawer in the desk to his left.

  Takumu accepted the two-meter-long cable, and as he inserted one end into his own blue Neurolinker, he said something even more surprising: “Right now, in a direct duel, I’m going to transfer half my reserve points to you. With this, you’ll at least be out of immediate danger. And then we’ll choose the time and place, fight each duel like our lives are on the line, and win some matches. We’ll get enough points to somehow get back into the safe zone.”

  Unconsciously, Haruyuki held his breath. With a direct duel, there wasn’t the restriction of challenging the same opponent only once a day. So the idea was that if they dueled over and over, they could transfer as many points as they wanted. It was such a simple and immediately effective strategy to evade the crisis.

  Haruyuki sat dumbfounded, and Takumu pushed the other end of the cable into his hand. “C’mon, Haru.”

  Urged on by his friend, Haruyuki moved to insert the plug into the direct terminal on his Neurolinker. Immediately before he did, however, his hand froze.

  Takumu, sitting only half a meter or so away, twisted up his face slightly, and then a smile like he was enduring something painful spread across his face. “Oh. Of course, this method assumes you can trust me. If I caught you off guard and defeated you, in that instance, you’d lose Brain Burst—”

  “N-no. That’s not it. That’s not it at all, Taku.” Unconsciously, Haruyuki grabbed hold of Takumu’s shoulder. Beneath the fabric of his school uniform, Haruyuki could feel the strong muscles tensing as he continued earnestly, “I didn’t even think for a second that you would betray me. It’s not that; it’s the opposite. I just…I’m not sure if even I have the right to ask you to do something like this.”

  “Wh-what are you even saying, Haru?!” Instantly, Takumu had turned his whole body to face him, and he reached out to grab Haruyuki’s shoulder. A single-minded determination came over his intellectual face. “Now isn’t the time to be worrying about something like that! The next time you lose to an opponent at the same level as you and have those ten points taken from you, you’ll end up having a forced uninstall of Brain Burst! And it’ll be because I forgot to tell you something important! Which is why it’s only natural for me to share my points with you right now.”

  “But you still don’t really have the points to spare!” Haruyuki shouted back, with a force that, if seen from the outside, would resemble nothing other than a fight.

  The original reason that Takumu had been relying on a cheat tool like a backdoor program was because he had overused acceleration and backed himself into a corner points-wise. He had recovered to some degree from this unstable position through the tag-team matches with Haruyuki over the previous tw
o weeks, but even so, he had probably only just barely gotten back into the safe zone himself. If he handed over half his points to Haruyuki now, there was no doubt that he’d drop back down to the danger level once more.

  But Takumu shot back in a tone that brooked no argument, “You don’t need to worry about that. Once you have a little wiggle room, you can just give them back in a direct duel again. This is simply an emergency remedy. And have you thought about what an enormous shock it would be for Master in the hospital if you were to lose everything now?”

  “…That’s…”

  It was true. It was just like Takumu said: Kuroyukihime, aka “Master,” had been seriously injured two weeks earlier and was now undergoing micromachine treatment in the HCU. She looked forward every day to the growth of her “child,” Haruyuki. If she learned that he had lost all his points immediately after going up to level two, her condition might even worsen from the shock of it.

  “You said it yourself, didn’t you, Haru?!” Takumu leaned forward and continued in an even more urgent tone. “Once you’re level two, we’d announce that Suginami, a blank space all this time, was going to be the territory of Nega Nebulus! You’re the one who said that even after Master was out of the hospital, we’d make it so that she could connect to the global net safely!”

  “Ngh!” Haruyuki clenched his teeth as he debated which course of action to take.

  Finally, his voice slipped brokenly through trembling lips. “Taku. But…but, like— Brain Burst might have a ‘draw’ command, but there’s no ‘resign’ command. So if we want to make one of us win, we’ll either have to hit each other and then wait for thirty minutes to pass, or just keep up a one-sided attack until your HP gauge runs out. Or inflict mortal blows on our own selves. That…I don’t want to do that.”

  “It’s okay.” Takumu loosened his grip on Haruyuki’s shoulder and smiled slightly. “I’m not worried about that at all. It’s to help a comrade—a friend. It’s no big deal to take a blow in the Normal Duel Field. So come on—put the plug in, Haru.”

  There was nothing but simple compassion in Takumu’s face and voice, which was exactly why Haruyuki couldn’t reach out for the XSB cable on his knees.

  Even now, two weeks after they had become comrades in the same Legion, Haruyuki could see Takumu’s own desire to punish himself in everything he said. And given what his friend had done, it was no small wonder. But in the final battle at the hospital, he had gotten out all the feelings that had been building up in the depths of his heart all these years and exchanged blows with Haruyuki with all his might. After the fight, he had apologized to Chiyuri and Kuroyukihime, and left the Blue Legion. Takumu’s crimes had been washed away now. Haruyuki believed that.

  That was exactly why he couldn’t cling to Takumu now. He and Takumu had to be forever equal friends and comrades. At the end of their battle, Haruyuki had been the one to declare that. If he let himself be babied now by Takumu’s kindness only to drag his friend down with him into the danger zone, his own words would be a lie. And more than that, Haruyuki’s gamer spirit simply would not allow a unilateral attack on an unresisting friend to accept—no, take—his points, whatever the circumstances.

  “But…Kuroyukihime. I mean, the Black King, Black Lotus, like…” Haruyuki stared into Takumu’s light-colored eyes. “She saved me from the out-of-control car by using the ‘physical full burst’ command. Her points balance must be pretty precarious, too. But she never once told me to share my points with her. And even if I had said we should, I know she would’ve gotten super angry. When it comes to level, strength, or experience, I can’t even begin to compare to her. But at least as a Burst Linker, I want to live like her.”

  Takumu said nothing for a few seconds. Then, finally, a smile stretched across his pale face, as if accepting surrender. “As always, you’re so stubborn once you’ve decided something, Haru.”

  His grip on Haruyuki’s shoulder slackening, he pulled his hand away and patted his friend’s shoulder. Takumu pulled the plug from his own Neurolinker, and as he bundled the cord back up, he resumed his cool expression.

  “It’s true that even if I did transfer just the barest minimum of points, it wouldn’t resolve the basic problem. The issue is that when your point balance is in danger, the pressure calls up an unconscious panic. If you panic, your field of view in duels gets narrower. Panic takes away your ability to deal with the situation. Before, I said we’ll fight each and every duel like our lives were on the line, but that’s really incredibly hard to do. The desire to win is important, but it’s sort of a false friend to the desire not to lose your points. Like, honestly? When my point balance hit a hundred at the beginning of the fall, my average duel win rate was at thirty percent.”

  “Yeah, I get what you’re saying. Even if I did take a huge gamble and duel right now, I have faith that I wouldn’t be able to really move properly and I’d lose.”

  “That’s a weird kind of faith.” Takumu smiled wryly, and then his face grew serious again. “As for how to get out of this mess, there’s only one other way.”

  “What?! There’s still another way?!” Haruyuki’s eyes flew open.

  Takumu hesitated a moment before responding in a quiet voice, “Yeah. It’s fairly risky. And there’s a greater-than-zero possibility of having more than your points taken. But it’s the only other thing I can think of.”

  Haruyuki continued to hold his breath. Takumu looked at him and uttered something entirely unexpected.

  “Hire the bouncer. Until your points are back in the safe range again.”

  3

  A sunny Saturday, 12:50 PM.

  Haruyuki rocked back and forth on a Chuo Line train. While the cars and motorcycles of road traffic had changed a fair bit compared with the beginning of the twenty-first century, the train had maintained the same basic structure for nearly a century. It was now entirely automatic, with driving entrusted to an AI, and considerable improvements had been made for rocking and noise, but the overall concept of stuffing many passengers into a box-shaped car hadn’t changed at all.

  Ahhh, this takes me back, Haruyuki murmured to himself as he stood next to Takumu, not too far from the door. To his eyes, Takumu in his street clothes was flawlessly cool. He was already 175 centimeters tall while still in seventh grade, and in his elegantly faded black jeans and baggy sweater, with a navy mod coat over that, he was getting glances from the many girls on the train with them.

  But the instant they saw the squat, jiggly creature next to Takumu, their eyes were an abyss of misgivings. Exactly what was this combination? If their positions were reversed, Haruyuki would himself be thinking that. When they were in elementary school, he could hardly stand it; it made him want to dig a hole and crawl inside. But fortunately, it seemed that this year, he had acquired the mental fortitude that allowed him to even feel fondly nostalgic in that same situation. Besides, he didn’t really have the mental energy to wilt under the eyes of strangers at the moment.

  And that was because the continuation of his life as a Burst Linker was to be decided by the person he was on his way to meet. He was a torch before the wind.

  An announcement was displayed in his field of view, indicating the train would soon be arriving at Ochanomizu.

  Takumu tugged on the sleeve of Haruyuki’s varsity jacket. “This is our stop.”

  “Oh, right.” Haruyuki nodded and wiped the sweat from his palms on his baggy pants. The person he was meeting had instructed him to go to the café terrace of a large bookstore in Jimbocho. They would have to walk a little from Ochanomizu Station, but even still, it wouldn’t take more than half an hour.

  Naturally, given that this person was also a Burst Linker, they couldn’t actually meet face-to-face. So then why did they need a meeting spot in the real world? It turned out that that was the sole compensation demanded by the only bouncer in the Accelerated World.

  A Burst Linker’s greatest taboo—exposing themselves in the real.

  “B-bouncer?!�
� Haruyuki parroted back the previous day in his room, and then fell speechless.

  Takumu nodded and began to quietly explain. “I’ve only ever seen him from the Gallery. I’ve never actually met or spoken with him. His avatar’s named Aqua Current. Armor color: ‘variable.’”

  “Aqua…Current.” Haruyuki had never heard the name before, which wasn’t strange given that there were about a thousand Burst Linkers in the city of Tokyo, but the problem was what came after that. “Armor color…variable? What does variable mean?”

  “You’d understand if you saw him…is what I want to say, but the more information you have, the better. So, right…how can I explain it…?” Unusually for Takumu, who normally had a logical explanation at the ready at all times, he hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before saying rather unexpectedly, “Haru. So water is not water-colored, right?”

  “Huh?” Haruyuki made a stupid sound as he thought about it. If you were going to say a general color for water, it would obviously be blue. But it went without saying that water itself was colorless and transparent. So it was nothing more than just dependent on the situation, and sometimes, it looked blue. “So then, the color of this Aqua Current’s armor isn’t the blue of water, but the color of water…Is that what you mean?”

  “That’s exactly it. But I think you can’t understand it any better without actually seeing it. Anyway, more important than what he looks like is his play style.” Takumu stopped there and wet his throat with the grapefruit juice Haruyuki had brought in from the kitchen before they started talking. “He’s the only one in the Accelerated World in the bodyguard trade…or maybe I should say he’s role-playing. At any rate, he advocates that kind of style. And he only works for newbies. More specifically, he’s hired by Burst Linkers up to level two whose points are on the edge, and he works as his employer’s partner in tag-team matches until they’re out of the danger zone again. Rumor has it that none of his employers have ever lost all their points while he was on duty.”