Snow White’s Slumber Read online

  Heeeengah! With a screaming roar, two cloudy blood-red great lances shot out of Mark II’s guns.

  The two beams of energy plunged into the spot where the five had stood only a moment earlier, and then all color disappeared from the world.

  The eternal twilight of the sky, the school that served as the headquarters for the Acceleration Research Society—all of it became a black line drawing on a white background. In the middle of all this, the only color was the half sphere glittering a sinister dark red as it ballooned ever outward to swallow up even the iron giant that had launched it until it filled the courtyard that was fifty meters to a side. It closed in on the feet of Haruyuki and his friends as he ascended with everything he had.

  He didn’t feel heat or pressure. Instead, Haruyuki was aware of a freezing chill and an intense gravity trying to suck him into the energy ball. Certain it would devour them if he eased up even a little, he continued to fly up toward the rough monotone sketch of the sky.

  “Th-the school is—!” Takumu shouted.

  Haruyuki couldn’t spare a millisecond to look down and check, but he figured the school building surrounding the courtyard had been destroyed.

  Normally, that would have been impossible: The school in which Haruyuki and his friends had fought Black Vise and Argon Array was designated as a player home, as hard as that was to believe, which meant it was indestructible. Even to make a tiny hole in the wall separating classroom from courtyard, Haruyuki and Takumu had used successive full-power Incarnate attacks, and they’d still needed Chiyuri’s help to finally make it through.

  So given that Mark II had just pulverized such a building, it had not fired a normal energy bullet, but rather an Incarnate bullet with nihilistic attributes—in other words, an attack of the same type as the Dark Shot launched by the ISS kit users, but with tens, hundreds of times the power.

  “Whoaaaa!!” Haruyuki squeezed out a cry as he continued his desperate flight.

  If it had been Silver Crow’s original wings alone, his special-attack gauge would have been completely exhausted in the blink of an eye with this all-out ascent carrying four people, and they would have already been caught in the explosion. But the power of the new wings he’d been given by the F-type Enemy who said she was the main body of Archangel Metatron—he hadn’t even known there was such a thing until that day—was incredible, and he pushed back against the gravity of the Accelerated World and the attractive force of the negative energy, rising to ever-higher altitudes in the blink of an eye.

  Once they had passed a height of fifty meters, one hundred meters, one hundred fifty meters, the chill and roar and pull finally receded and disappeared.

  “We should be okay now, Crow,” Niko said.

  “Thanksy,” Pard murmured.

  He slackened his ascent speed but flew up another twenty meters just in case before shifting to hovering. Timidly, he gazed downward.

  “Unh…Aah…” The voice that slipped out was so hoarse, Haruyuki couldn’t believe it was his own.

  Color finally returned to the Field, and the southern part of the Minato Ward Area spread out before him. To his left, the east side, stood national highway No. 1, Sakurada Street. To his right, the west side, was the overhead bridge for expressway No. 2. The school, the Acceleration Research Society headquarters, that should have been wedged between the two—no longer existed.

  In its place was a large crater nearly 150 meters across. This attack had brought about the same level of destruction as the laser of Metatron’s first form that he had witnessed from Roppongi Hills Tower, but the scale was even larger, with not even a single plume of smoke. The ground had been carved away like a god had dug into it with a giant spoon to shell out a loose arc. The surrounding air swirled up into a roaring whirlwind. There had been at least one tamed knight-type Enemy on the first floor of the school, but that, too, had been instantly evaporated.

  Looking down at the terrain around the crater, something jabbed sharply at his memory, but this sensation flew out of his head instantly when he spotted the copper-colored giant rising up in the center of that gray crater, entirely uninjured.

  “Getting sucked into an attack like that…and not a scratch on ya,” Niko said, her tone unable to hide the shock.

  If they had followed through on their initial strategy of diving in below its legs before the bombardment, the giant wouldn’t have hesitated to turn its main armaments directly downward on itself, and right about now, Haruyuki and his comrades would have been dust along with the school. If Mark II was still in the ruins when they regenerated sixty minutes later, they might have even taken another hit and been killed instantly, falling into an unlimited EK.

  Exactly. This thing was an Enemy now. And forget Beast class, the Mark II surpassed Legend class; in the worst-case scenario, it even rivaled the super-class Enemies beyond that, the Four Gods.

  “This is ridiculous…How could it…?” Chiyuri shook her green pointed hat from side to side in Takumu’s arms. This was the girl who had surprised Haruyuki and Takumu by pulling off any number of unexpected turnarounds in too many tight spots, but this time, she appeared to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the destruction.

  As was Haruyuki. He’d been able to lift off after the warning from Metatron, who was connected to him through the wings, but he had absolutely no idea what they should do now. The core of his mind was completely numb.

  But they couldn’t stay aboveground forever. The Metatron Wings got pretty good mileage, and even hovering with four people hanging off of him, his special-attack gauge was only gradually being consumed, but even so, it would run out sooner or later. They had to reformulate their strategy and find somewhere to land before it did.

  The one to break the fearful silence was Pard, glued to Haruyuki’s right half. “We have to find out how long those guns take to charge.”

  “Right,” Takumu replied immediately. “As far as I can see, his only weapons are the laser guns. If they take time to recharge, we can cling to him immediately after he fires…”

  Niko nodded firmly at this proposal. “And if we make him fire into the sky, we won’t get caught up in the explosion. So then…Crow, next laser, you dodge it somehow in midair.”

  “You can do it, Haru!”

  When even Chiyuri cheered him on, he couldn’t sit and cower forever. He took a deep breath. “Got it. I’m going to go in slowly, so, everyone, keep a close eye on him.”

  “I got this!” Niko shouted. She possessed a Vision Extension ability, and now she opened her eye lenses wide.

  Firming up his resolve, Haruyuki started a gentle descent.

  “Since the laser fired, it’s now forty-eight seconds, forty-nine, fifty…,” Pard counted calmly, having apparently kept careful track.

  Sinking down almost vertically, Haruyuki and his friends had reached an altitude of a hundred meters, when Mark II, encamped in the center of the crater, threw its enormous iron body backward and caught them with the crimson eyeball’s hungry gaze.

  “Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine…”

  Sixty.

  The giant raised both arms and got Haruyuki and his comrades in its sights with the lethal double barrels.

  “Nngh!” Kuroyukihime groaned at the pain, cold and biting.

  It felt like even her core was frozen. She had barely stopped the flying ISS kit terminal from touching her avatar with the sword of her right hand, but a dozen tentacles extended from it to pierce the cracks in her armor and press inward. Several had already reached her avatar’s naked body.

  If her sword—the reason for her nickname, World End—had been in perfect condition, it would have cut a little thing like the terminal in two instantly, but it was broken and battered after the battle with the main body; she was unable to muster even half of its normal cutting power. And the small eyeball was elastic—rubbery—so that no matter how she pressed her blade into it, it simply warped and twisted; she couldn’t get a handle on it.

  “Lotus!” Fuko s
houted again, reaching out from her wheelchair to try to pull the kit terminal off.

  A little farther away, Akira splashed, as if she was about to run to her Legion master’s side.

  But Kuroyukihime called out sharply, “Stop!”

  “What?!” The girls froze in place, their faces clouded with apprehension, as though they worried the pollution of the kit had already reached her mind.

  “No, I’m fine,” Kuroyukihime reassured them immediately. “But…I can hear something through this thing…No, I can see something…” She closed her eye lenses beneath her goggles.

  Sound. Deel, deel, deel. From far, far away, she heard a heavy, low rumbling that was hard to describe, like an animal breathing or a machine running.

  And…sight. The image of a square space enclosed by white walls with plenty of windows, reminiscent of a school somehow, was hazily projected in the back of her mind. For a brief moment, she felt a strange sensation that was almost like nostalgia. She wondered at first if it was the courtyard at Umesato, but there were walls on all sides, so that wasn’t it. It was somewhere she’d never seen—never been…

  “………!!”

  Kuroyukihime clenched her teeth hard, eyes still closed, in her immense shock.

  She knew this place. A courtyard enclosed by school walls on all sides. The altar-like fountain in its center. It had been transformed in the Twilight stage of the Accelerated World, but there was no mistaking this sense of scale—this atmosphere.

  …This is…that school. Stunned, when she looked down at her feet from a viewpoint about at the height of a window on the second floor, Kuroyukihime was visited by a fresh shock.

  Five small human silhouettes were lined up and looking her way. One was a remarkably small, crimson duel avatar. And on the back of the avatar standing next to her were silver wings that glittered in the evening sun—

  “Lotus!!” Fuko’s strained cry rang out once more, and Kuroyukihime’s eyes flew open.

  As the phantom scene disappeared, she met the eye of the ISS kit terminal, suddenly only ten centimeters away from her. The sword of her right hand should have been digging into the eye, but all it was doing was yanking back just three of the tentacles. She hurriedly tried to push the bloody orb away, but the tentacles stretched in response, and the inky eye drew steadily closer.

  Fuko and Akira both reached out and yanked several tentacles away. But the kit terminal’s survival instinct was too powerful, like it was the last of its kind; it kept pressing in on Kuroyukihime’s face. Eyelids open wide, the crimson pupil emitted a hungry glow just centimeters away.

  In the depths of that eye full of empty darkness…Kuroyukihime saw it. Light in the shape of two guns, bodies overlapped to form an X. The crossed guns: the emblem of the Red King and Master Gunsmith, Red Rider.

  And in the very instant the eye was about to touch Black Lotus’s goggles, the two guns changed angles with a decisive metallic sound to line up on the horizontal—turning from an X into a minus sign.

  Likewise, the crimson iris of the kit terminal suddenly turned gray, all light fading from it. The straining tentacles hung limply and dropped away from Black Lotus’s armor. Fuko and Akira pulled their hands back, and the eye fell to the floor, rolling about a meter before coming to a stop.

  “That was close,” Fuko said.

  Akira nodded while she said in a slightly reproachful voice, “I was a little worried. What exactly did you see?”

  “Oh, mmm. I’m not sure how to explain it,” Kuroyukihime murmured, expelling a long-held breath. Lifting her face, she first crushed the small eye on the floor with her foot before looking over at the ISS kit main body enshrined a little ways off.

  The magma of the floor seemed to be finally cooling off, but rather than returning to its original marble form, it was hardening into a gray concrete. The kit main body’s lower half was buried there—countless fine cracks on its charred surface and tiny pieces peeling off and falling to the ground. The pupil that had launched the kit terminal continued to open wider, and she could see a clear-blue light pulsing regularly inside it. It was the light of the Midtown Tower portal that had been incorporated into the main body.

  “The kit terminal that tried to parasitize me seems to have been linked to something. But it wasn’t the main body there…It was something far from Midtown Tower…And Haruyuki and the others were—”

  “What?!” Fuko cried out in surprise. She gripped the wheels of her chair tightly. “So Corvus and the others are fighting this ‘something’ then? We have to hurry and help them!”

  “Before we do, we have to completely destroy the ISS kit main body,” Akira noted. “And someone has to return to the other side through the portal to pull out the Red King’s cable.”

  Kuroyukihime thought for a moment before shaking her head. “No. It seems there’s no need for that. I saw Niko standing next to Haruyuki. He got her back from Black Vise.”

  “Really?” Fuko smiled, relieved. “Thank goodness. How very like Corvus, hmm?”

  Kuroyukihime nodded, but there was still something that concerned her. Silver Crow and his team were facing off against the “something” that was linked to the ISS kit terminal, most likely generated by the massive negative Incarnate energy sent out from the kit main body. So why hadn’t the Red King deployed her Enhanced Armament, Invincible? Well, she’d find out the answer to that when they got there. She had only seen it for a moment, but Kuroyukihime knew the precise coordinates.

  “Let’s hurry and regroup with Haruyuki and the others. But first…” Kuroyukihime brandished the sword of her right hand and stared at the ISS kit main body.

  “Rider. It was you who activated the crossed guns’ safety and saved me. You promised to deactivate all the kit terminals if we destroyed the main body.”

  There was no response. But Kuroyukihime felt like she could see the back of the first Red King riding off somewhere, straddling his beloved horse as he waved two fingers of his right hand in a kind of salute.

  “Farewell, BBK…Red Rider.”

  She pulled the brandished sword back and shouted, “Death By Piercing!!”

  Her special attack was activated without incident even though the tip of her blade was broken, and the resultant light sword easily pierced the ISS kit main body. The inky eyeball shrank inward for just a moment before exploding into millions of pieces. A dark pillar soared up to the ceiling before gradually growing thinner and disappearing. So far, this looked like the death effect of a duel avatar, but she still couldn’t say for sure. Would the death marker appear or not? That would make the truth of the ISS kit main body clear.

  But what actually happened was far beyond anything Kuroyukihime and her comrades had expected. The black fragments shooting through the air became red ribbons one after another and dissolved into nothingness. Weaving the ribbons was the thread of fine binary code.

  This was a duel avatar’s—

  “…Final extinction event?!” Fuko squeezed a strained voice out.

  “It is,” Akira assented.

  No marker appeared, but there was no room for doubt. The ISS kit main body was a duel avatar—no, a Burst Linker, and with Kuroyukihime’s final attack, their Burst Points had dropped to zero, so they had vanished from the Accelerated World forever. In other words, while the reason for it was unclear, the main body’s points had been on the verge of drying up.

  As the last of the red ribbons melted into the air, a crisp blue light spilled out and colored the entire stage—it was the appearance of the portal that had been locked up inside the kit body. The pulsing blue light was almost holy, purifying the miasma that had filled the floor.

  With this, not only was the last kit that had tried to parasitize Kuroyukihime deactivated, but now all the ISS kits already equipped by Magenta Scissor, Avocado Avoider, and every other user should have been deactivated—and the mental interference cut off as well. Naturally, this also included the kit parasitizing Ash Roller/Rin Kusakabe lying in the nurse’s office
in the real world.

  Who exactly had the kit main body been? Why had they been nearly out of points? Mysteries remained, but Kuroyukihime put those questions aside for the time being and turned around. “Raker, I’m sure you want to go running to your child’s side…”

  Fuko shook her head, indicating that there was no need for Kuroyukihime to finish. “I understand. There’s still something we have left to do, yes? Let’s hurry to where the others are and fight this enemy—although I’m not quite sure what it is. And then, we’ll all go home together.”

  It wasn’t Kuroyukihime or Akira who responded to those determined words.

  “You’re exactly…right. I’m more than able to keep fighting.” The voice was faint, but there was a strong center to it; its owner was Utai, held in Fuko’s arms.

  Kuroyukihime gasped and turned her gaze in that direction to see the shrine maiden avatar return her gaze, eye lenses alight once again. “Are you all right, Maiden?”

  “Yes. I was simply pulled in slightly because I used the Incarnate technique for so long…But you, Ren, and Fu protected me, Lo.” Smiling, the little girl slowly raised her hands and wrapped her arms around Fuko. Looking like the very picture of a girl adoring her older sister, she pressed her face into the chest of the sky-blue avatar. “Thank you, Fu.”

  Like many Burst Linkers, Utai Shinomiya changed what she called her comrades in the real world and the Accelerated World. For instance, Kuroyukihime was Sacchi or Lo, and Haruyuki Arita was Arita or C. But when it came to Fuko, at some point, Utai had started calling both the duel avatar and her real self Fu, for the most part.

  Fu was the Fu from Fuko, so there was a slight risk of this leading to being cracked in the real. In fact, for a while after she joined the Legion, it had been Raker. Given how reserved and generally reluctant Utai was to reveal the depths of her heart—although on this note, Kuroyukihime herself was hardly one to talk—the fact that she was so stuck on the name Fu, which could almost be said to be a violation of manners as well, was proof that she wanted this connection with Fuko that much, this true bond.