The Twilight Marauder Read online

  “That’s an anomalocaris. Creature from the Cambrian period.”

  Haruyuki whirled around at Chiyuri’s voice to where her slender avatar stood behind him, treading on a star-shaped black pillow, likely a crown-of-thorns starfish. The avatar design—body covered in a soft violet fur, clad in a short slip-on dress and looking like what might happen if cats evolved into people—was the one she used on the Umesato Junior High School local net.

  Blinking large blue eyes in a face that was 60 percent cat, Chiyuri sniffed haughtily. “You’re still using that avatar, huh? Just change it to something else already.”

  Haruyuki glanced down at his own body and saw the pig-shaped pink body he also used at school. Round limbs on a nearly spherical torso. A flat nose protruded from the center of his face, and although he couldn’t see them, he should also have had large ears sprouting from his head. No one was ever going to call this look cool or cute, and the truth was, Haruyuki hadn’t even chosen this avatar. But he just sort of kept on using it for some reason.

  He twitched his nose defensively and said, “I’m used to how this body feels. It’d just be a hassle to change it after all this time. Anyway, I wasn’t asking about this weirdo cushion creature; I meant the VR space itself. Seriously, what is this, this cushion hel—heaven?”

  Chiyuri had always liked these stuffed animal cushion things, and he remembered she had a bunch on her bed, but this place was completely over the top. He wondered what the total mass of the objects in the space was as he asked his question, but the cat avatar only laughed proudly, her beribboned tail flicking back and forth.

  “Nee-hee-hee! Nice, huh? My parents expanded our home server to make memory just for me, as a present for passing last year. Even at this resolution, it’s fifteen kilometers from end to end!”

  “S-seriously?!” He recoiled reflexively, sending his round bottom shooting backward and ending up buried between the elephant and the anomalocaris. As he struggled frantically in the pillows, he thought about how, if he had had that much capacity, he could’ve recreated the battlefield at Kursk in 1943. He could have placed a ton of Tiger and T-34 tanks on the ground and Bf 109 fighter planes in the sky. What a marvelous scene of blood and carnage this could be.

  “Hey…Heyyy, Chiyu…If you wanted to share some of that generosi—”

  “No!!” Chiyuri snapped, cutting him off. She stuck out her tongue, behind which he spied a mouth full of tiny teeth. “If I let you customize it, you’d totally just fill it full of awful stuff like oil and steel and smoke.”

  “B-but isn’t that a good thing…”

  “No! It’s! Not! Honestly, I can’t even talk to you.”

  Haruyuki looked up at the cat avatar crossing her thin arms, and he finally remembered the reason he was there in the first place. “Ah…I…I see. So, what would you like me to do?”

  “Just sit right there.”

  “Huh?” Confused, Haruyuki cocked his head to one side, still on the enormous pillow, short legs splayed in front of him. And then—

  Pyoing! The cat avatar before him pounced, and with no hesitation whatsoever, laid her slim body across said legs.

  “Wh-whoa?!” Haruyuki jumped up to break free, but Chiyuri reached up and caught his nose. Squeezing snugly, she yanked him back down into their original position.

  “You stay here awhile and be my pillow. And then I’ll forget that time on the school trip. And just so you know, if you do anything pervy, I’ll make the anomalocaris gnaw at you.”

  “I-I won’t! But I mean—pillow? What do you…”

  Ignoring Haruyuki’s now shrill voice, Chiyuri snapped the small claws at the ends of her fingers. Instantly, the calm blue sky above began to rotate, transforming from the horizon into a night sky, complete with an enormous floating moon.

  Beneath picture-book stars that twinkled with a faint ringing effect, Chiyuri stretched luxuriously and curled up on Haruyuki’s lap. “This isn’t serious or anything, you know.” The mumbled words tumbled from a mouth Haruyuki couldn’t see. “I was just remembering how I used to use you as a pillow and fall asleep right away, back when you came and stayed at our house a lot.”

  “Wh-when was that?”

  “Dunno. A long…long time ago.” She yawned widely, and the cat avatar closed her eyes.

  Ask Taku to do this kind of stuff, Haruyuki started to say, but then he swallowed the words. He was the only one who had been Chiyuri’s substitute pillow when they were kids. Takumu’s parents had a strict education policy, and he was almost never allowed to stay over at either of their houses.

  But, even so, was this a conditioned reflex left over from so long ago? After all, they were both animal-type avatars in a virtual cushion heaven created by their Neurolinkers. Of course, this sort of behavior absolutely couldn’t happen with their real bodies. In fact, he wasn’t even sure it was okay in VR, either, if the truth be told.

  As his thoughts spun round and round in his brain, to his surprise, he found Chiyuri had dropped into the deep, calm breaths of sleep.

  “Come on…,” he groaned, and Chiyuri, not quite as asleep as he thought, responded in a muffled, indistinct voice:

  “Hey, Haru…I really did try hard…”

  “Huh? At what?”

  “To become a Burst Linker…I worked so hard…And now, we can go back, right? Like back then…The three of us hanging out every day until it’s time for bed…Like…back…”

  And now it seemed that Chiyuri had actually fallen into proper sleep. Suu, suu. Her avatar made virtual snoozing sounds. Haruyuki ran a gentle hand over the soft fur at the base of her ears and answered her with a sigh in his heart.

  There are some things that never change.

  But there are some things that do change and never go back to the way they were.

  A few minutes later, Chiyuri’s Neurolinker detected her deep sleep state and automatically released the full dive. Even after the cat avatar disappeared from his lap with a ringing sound effect, Haruyuki sat quietly for a while among the silent animals.

  2

  With a mere three classes in each grade, the private Umesato Junior High School in eastern Suginami was in no way large. Even still, the eyes of all three hundred and sixty school students, neatly lined up in the gym, exerted a substantial pressure when focused in one place. If, hypothetically, he himself had been standing at that focal point, Haruyuki was confident the combined force of so many eyeballs would burn an actual hole into him.

  However, the person on stage for the welcome ceremony, speaking in a voice so clear it reached even the very back row without the use of a Neurolinker, appeared so cool as to give the impression that the pressure load of those eyes was automatically zero.

  “The majority of you are likely feeling anticipation and unease in equal measure. In particular, the new students among you might be deeply perplexed by this unknown school and these unfamiliar schoolmates. However, I want you to consider this: The people behind you right now looking so calm and comfortable were in the exact same uneasy position, sitting in the exact same seats as you, a year ago, two years ago…”

  I can’t even believe that someone who can say amazing things like this could actually be the destroyer of order in another world, a murderer without mercy, and a demon instructor who’d put even a US Marine to shame.

  As he grumbled to himself, Haruyuki turned his gaze to the female student on the stage, with a longing he couldn’t entirely suppress—Kuroyukihime, uniform blouse adorned with a deep red ribbon and her long, well-proportioned legs encased in black tights.

  With her, he had a special relationship—or so he called it, because, even though it had already been six months since its inception, and it was undeniably special in every way, Haruyuki still couldn’t manage to get to a place where he was able to say “girlfriend” and “boyfriend.” The general attitude at school seemed to be on that same page, with some even theorizing that Kuroyukihime had rescued the tiny, round, younger student from bullying out of dut
y or pity and now dragged him around like a beloved pet.

  And Haruyuki had no complaints about this theory. He actually even thought it was probably true, although she did hold off on the pet treatment. But he was perfectly satisfied with the idea, serving his princess as a knight—no, a servant—no, no, a page.

  “…a year is thirty-one million, five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds, and although this time looms before you now as an eternity, it will pass in a mere instant. Spend it wisely. Thank you.”

  Bowing her head, long black hair fanning out in front of her before her body bobbed back up along its wave, Kuroyukihime added herself to the line of student council members behind her.

  As he clapped earnestly along with the rest of the students, Haruyuki was suddenly struck with the thought, I’m in eighth grade and she’s in ninth. Which means just one more year. And then she’ll graduate from Umesato. But, okay, that doesn’t mean our relationship has to end. Our bond is much stronger than just students at the same junior high—as Burst Linkers, we’re parent and child.

  He squeezed both eyes shut tightly before opening them again to clap his hands even harder when, staring single-mindedly at Kuroyukihime on the distant stage, he got the impression that the detached beauty twitched for a mere instant.

  Her narrowed jet-black eyes stopped dead at the very front of where the new seventh graders were lined up, and then quickly faced forward again. Haruyuki furrowed his brow, craned his neck from his seat, and tried to see whom she had pierced with that gaze. But of course, he couldn’t make out any one person in the sea of uniforms.

  Returning to the school building after the entrance ceremony, Haruyuki almost climbed to the third floor out of habit before hurriedly changing course for his new classroom on the second.

  He had been notified of the location of his new homeroom via his Neurolinker, but he wouldn’t know the names of his new classmates until he stepped through the door. Fervently praying—Please don’t let there be anyone who’ll call me Pig and make me buy him snack bread again!—Haruyuki slipped through the door of eighth grade class C.

  “Haru! Heeey!”

  He heard the voice at the same time a pounding came at his back, knocking the breath from him. Haruyuki whirled ninety degrees to his left to see a familiar cat-shaped hairpin holding back familiar front fringe. The face of his childhood friend grinned back at him to reveal fang-like incisors.

  “Ch-Chiyu. You’re…here?”

  “What. What is that complicated look for?”

  “N-nothing,” he replied, cocking his head and wondering if maybe she had had that nightmare last night, given the way she was sniffing and pursing her lips.

  Even if he and Chiyuri were in the same class, as long as the bullying didn’t start again, he had nothing to be afraid of. But problems were problems, and this was one more. If he and Chiyuri were in the same class, the sides of their triangle could end up—

  “Hey, Haru. And Chi, too!”

  Pounded on the back once again, Haruyuki spun ninety degrees in the opposite direction to look up and see Takumu’s smiling face behind blue glasses.

  Apparently all three of them had been put in the same class, which meant their triangle would end up smaller. He remembered Chiyuri talking the night before about how they could go back to the way they were and was aware of a faint fluttering in his heart as he produced a similar smile. “Hey! You’re in class C, too, huh, Taku?…Let’s see.”

  He applied a dimly remembered probability formula to the situation and voiced the answer he managed to come up with. “The probability of three students ending up in the same class…is one-third times one-third times one-third, so one-twenty-seventh? Seriously random!”

  Takumu shook his head lightly as he walked toward the windows. “No, it’s one-ninth.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Why?” Chiyuri, having arrived at the same solution as Haruyuki, also raised her voice in surprise.

  Entrusting his sharp, tall physique to the window frame, Takumu raised his wireless glasses abruptly and explained, “If it’s the probability that all three of us would be in class C, it would be one-twenty-seventh, just like you said, Haru. But in this case, we didn’t know which class it would be. So the problem becomes the probability of all three of us ending up in class A or class B or class C, so the number is tripled and you get one-ninth.”

  “Ah!”

  “Right!” Nodding again with Chiyuri, Haruyuki finally laughed and added, “Just like you, Taku. Polishing up your professor character even over spring break—”

  “Haru, you seriously need to quit that! If I get stuck with the nickname Professor or Glasses or something in this class, it’ll be on your head.” Looking honestly put out, Takumu glanced around eighth grade class C, filling up with students, and lowered his voice. “Anyway. There are a lot of coincidences in the world, but if you do the calculation, the probability’s unexpectedly greater than your initial impression. So I think we should be ready just in case.”

  “Huh? For what?”

  “The incoming seventh graders,” Taku said in an even lower voice, bringing his face closer to the bewildered Haruyuki. “The possibility of an unknown Burst Linker mixed in with those one hundred and twenty people.”

  Haruyuki took a sharp breath and nodded repeatedly. “Th-that’s—I mean, the possibility’s not zero, but would anyone go to a different school than their parent? It’s one thing to transfer like you did, Taku, but…”

  “Yeah, normally, you wouldn’t dare make someone your ‘child’ if they were going to go to a different school from you, right? Because if there were other Burst Linkers at that school, there’s a pretty strong possibility your child would end up fighting on their side. I mean, the strongest relationship in the accelerated world is that of parent and child, but school affiliation comes right after.”

  Just as Takumu noted, Burst Linkers going to the same school would eventually, inevitably find one another “in the real.” So if you fought, the battle would have to be to the death, the kind of fight where the rules didn’t apply, a fight going beyond the framework of the game itself. In that sort of situation, if both parties wanted to keep Brain Burst, the only thing to be done would be to shake hands and call a truce somewhere, somehow.

  Which was why no Burst Linker would choose as their child someone who might go on to a different school. All of which was to say, given that the only Burst Linkers enrolled at Umesato Junior High were Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki, and Takumu—and Chiyuri for the time being—it was basically impossible for an unknown Burst Linker to come to their school as an incoming seventh grader. However, that didn’t mean they didn’t need to bother checking.

  “Um…when exactly do new students first connect to the local net?” Haruyuki asked Takumu, trying to remember what it had been like when he was a new student the previous year.

  “Should be right about now. If it’s the same here as at my old school, once the entrance ceremony’s over and you go back to your classroom, that’s when the new accounts are handed out.”

  Mulling over this answer, Haruyuki finally smiled and said, “Then how about we do this? If we have to spend the Burst Points to see if there are any new Burst Linkers, let’s check out Chiyu’s duel avatar in the duel field at the same time. After the next homeroom, I’ll accelerate and challenge Chiyu. Taku, you join in the Gallery.”

  Their new homeroom teacher was a young man who taught Japanese History. Sugeno, as this teacher was named, was for his age a surprisingly firm advocate against children needing the net, and, although Haruyuki personally could not get onboard with that idea at all, their new teacher was well received by other students because of his passion.

  He ignored Sugeno’s policy speech, the general gist of which was, “If you look up everything on the net, you’ll all end up adults who can’t think for themselves!” and somehow managed to make it through the student self-intro time. As soon as first period was over, he invoked the acceleration command.
/>   “Burst Link!”

  Skreeeee!

  The dry thunder reverberated loudly in his brain as the scene around him was dyed a single shade of blue. At the same time, Sugeno, on his way down from the podium, and the other students, on their way up from their chairs, froze instantly.

  Time hadn’t stopped. The Brain Burst program hidden in Haruyuki’s Neurolinker had just accelerated his consciousness a thousandfold.

  He touched the conspicuously bright, flaming B icon on the left side of his virtual desktop and launched the console, then waited for the matching list to refresh with a certain amount of heart pounding.

  Silver Crow—the name of Haruyuki’s own duel avatar—soon popped up at the very top of the list. The level display to the right read 4. Black Lotus, aka Kuroyukihime, soon followed him. Her level was, obviously, nine. And then Takumu appeared, Cyan Pile, level four like Haruyuki.

  After a slight pause, another row of letters sparkled into existence: Lime Bell. Level one.

  The search list display then disappeared. Which meant that at that moment, there were four Burst Linkers connected to the local Umesato Junior High net. Lime Bell had to be Chiyuri. And since all one hundred and twenty freshmen should have, without exception, finished signing into the local net by now, Haruyuki concluded that there were no new Burst Linkers among the incoming students after all.

  However, there was, in fact, just one thing gnawing at him. The way Kuroyukihime had turned momentarily toward the row of new students during the entrance ceremony. What was the meaning of that?

  He briefly thought about shooting off a mail to ask, but he thought the better of it. Kuroyukihime, as student council vice president, was probably swamped with a million tasks that had piled up over the break.

  As his avatar’s finger went to push down on the name of Umesato Junior High’s fourth Burst Linker, Haruyuki considered her briefly. Lime, that probably meant a yellow-green. So a little more mid-range than close-range. But he wouldn’t know what kind of abilities she actually had until he met her in combat.