The Floating Starlight Bridge Read online

  His timing should have been perfect. Why had the horn attack—which had to be much slower than a bullet—hit him so dead-on?

  The answer was revealed by Frost Horn, standing imposingly a little ways off.

  “Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Surprised you, huh, birdman! You’re always flying around up in the sky, so you wouldn’t know, but you see these stylish horns little me’s carrying around? The longer they’re in the Frosted Circle, the longer they get! They stand all sturdy and tall, right!”

  “…Wh-what…” Gaping, he stared hard and saw that the cone-shaped horns stretching out from the large blue avatar’s shoulders and forehead, encased in a thick ice, were indeed a fair bit longer than they had been at the start of the battle. And they were getting bigger with each passing second even at that moment. In other words, he could learn the timing after taking any number of tackle attacks, and it would still be pointless.

  “Whaddya think?! This is! A real man’s! Weapon! Ah-ha-ha! Haaaa!”

  At Horn’s high-pitched laughter, cheers of “Hear! Hear!” and interjections like “That’s just rude” poured down from the members of the surrounding Gallery.

  Haruyuki took a deep breath and expelled it again as he listened to them.

  I made a mistake somewhere along the way here.

  Fighting recklessly without choosing my opponent looks kind of like tearing down my own style to push myself into a fight, but they’re not the same. Thinking I could win on my opponent’s turf without any kind of strategy at all is exactly the same as sneering at my opponent. When facing an enemy, I should be digging out everything I have and fighting for real right from the start. And if I don’t do that, there’s really no reason why I should have a chance of winning.

  I’m going full throttle starting now!

  Haruyuki made fists of both hands and thrust them out to deploy the wings on his back. With the damage they’d done at the start and the hits he’d taken, his special-attack gauge was nearly half full. He’d get Chiyuri to heal them and then they’d flee to the sky. They could wait there for the Frosted Circle to be released before attacking with another double super dive to crush Tourmaline Shell first—

  “Geh!” In the middle of plotting out his strategy in his mind, something unexpected happened.

  His wings didn’t open.

  He immediately peered around at his back and saw the thick frost clinging to the metallic fins folded up there. It must have been acting as an adhesive to prevent them from deploying.

  Hurriedly, he brought his hands around to his back and tried to rub the frost off, while Horn watched.

  “Whoa! What?!” he cried. “Serious chance! Aaaawesome!” Dropping his hips, he readied the remarkably large horn on his forehead and positioned himself for a dash forward.

  With the shoulder tackle, Frost Horn had already shaved away 20 percent of Haruyuki’s gauge. The forehead was apparently the main attraction; he absolutely could not get slammed with it. That said, if he abandoned the idea of a counterattack and just focused on running around, the situation would only get worse. He had to do something, something, anything—

  “Heeeyah!!” A forceful battle cry echoed through the stage.

  Glancing over, he took in the sight of Lime Bell catching Tourmaline Shell’s chopping attack with her right hand and sending him flying with a magnificent one-armed throw.

  Set free with a pop, Shell crashed on his back nearly ten meters away from her. However, frustratingly, in a stage like the Primeval Forest, where the ground below was grass or sand, throwing techniques had little effect. The bluish-green avatar sustained no significant damage and was ready to bounce back onto his feet right away.

  But it seemed Chiyuri had had something else in mind with the one-armed throw.

  She whirled around without so much as a glance at where her opponent had landed and brought the large bell of her left hand high up into the air while shouting, “Citron Caaaaaaall!!”

  The bell came back down with a twirling flourish, and the lime green light that gushed from it, accompanied by a beautiful ringing, advanced in a straight line toward Haruyuki.

  And passed immediately by his left arm to disappear futilely in the frost behind him.

  “Wha…” Haruyuki’s dumbfounded voice was overwritten by Frost Horn’s high-pitched laughter.

  “A-ha-ha! In the Circle, like, light techniques have a hit rate thirty percent lower, you know! If you’re a real man! Fight! Mano a manoooooo!!”

  Whk! White frost danced up around Horn’s feet. He pushed off hard to plunge ferociously forward at Haruyuki. The long, large horn on his forehead glittered.

  Haruyuki racked his brains frantically in that brief instant of the enemy closing in on him.

  However poor her field of view might have been, had Chiyuri actually missed with her special attack there?

  She was the serious type when it came to things like that. If she was going to use her healing ability, she would wait for a time until she was sure of success. And more than that, Haruyuki’s health gauge was still down by only 20 percent. It was too soon to pull out Citron Call, given the poor mileage it got.

  Which meant that Chiyuri had meant to miss, or rather she had been aiming at something that wasn’t Silver Crow.

  And the element other than the duelers that was able to move around in the battle in this Primeval Forest stage was…

  The instant his thoughts reached this point, Haruyuki’s eyelids flew back and he understood exactly what he had to do. He waited for Frost Horn’s charge, dropping into a martial arts stance with one foot forward, and calculated the direction he should dodge in.

  “Waa…Ngyaaah!”

  Haruyuki pretended to be overawed at this throaty howl from Horn, turned, and ran with all his might to his left, perfectly tracing out the line Chiyuri’s special attack had drawn earlier. From behind, a subterranean rumbling closed in on him, and he was bursting with the foreboding of damage ripping into his back.

  After braking urgently and abruptly, he faced straight up and kicked at the ground with every ounce of his strength. He spread his arms out, bent his back, and flew past Horn in a backward somersault in order to come at him from behind.

  His enemy believed Silver Crow couldn’t use his wings. So he shouldn’t be expecting Haruyuki to dodge upward. And sure enough, although he felt the sharp tip scrape the center of his back, Haruyuki danced through the air, taking no more of a hit than that.

  The large avatar charged forward in a straight line in Haruyuki’s reversed view of the world. Ahead, in the dancing curtain of white frost, an enormous elliptical shadow floated up.

  “Whaaoo?!”

  The cry came from Frost Horn. He flapped both hands and tried putting the brakes on his charge. But because his feet were half frozen, he wasn’t able to stop immediately. Sending spectacular amounts of frost flying, he plunged straight into the round shadow.

  Krrshk! The dry and yet somehow wet sound of destruction rang through the air.

  The enormous ellipse broke into large pieces, and a transparent viscous fluid poured out. The something that crawled out from inside gave an angry cry, a greee to send chills down the spine.

  It was an enormous creature object, the sort you always had to be watching out for in a Primeval Forest stage. There were many different kinds—carnivorous beasts and dinosaurs and even predatory plants—but as a general rule, no matter what type of creature it was, it would attack any duel avatar who entered its sights without discrimination.

  The sole exception to this was when its egg was broken.

  Disturbed in its peaceful sleep inside the eggshell, the large creature would single-mindedly hunt the avatar who had done the deed for a full five hundred seconds, which was well over eight minutes. At that moment, an enormous long-horned beetle looked down on Frost Horn, its four eyes shining red as it clacked its large and sturdy jaw.

  As exasperated voices from the Gallery—“Aah, now he’s done it”—rained down, Horn threw up both hand
s and started to talk to the carapaced creature.

  “W-w-w-wait! If we just talk about this man-to-man, I know we can figure it out!”

  “Gree gree greeee!!”

  Unfortunately, it appeared to be female. Mowing down the surrounding Rafflesia with its large feelers, the long-horned beetle began to chase the avatar, which was half its size. As Horn shrieked and struggled with which way to flee, the large jaws snapped at the air above his head—klak klak—several times.

  Naturally, the giant creature eggs that could spawn such terror didn’t exist just anywhere. Even if you wanted to incorporate them into your battle strategy, you could spend your whole time in the duel searching intently and never find even one.

  But this one time at least, it wasn’t by accident that the egg rolled along.

  Chiyuri had made it. In the midst of the duel, she had noticed the shadow of the enormous insect moving on the other side of the frost. And then she had released her special attack, making it look like she was aiming at Haruyuki, but actually targeting the insect.

  In truth, Citron Call was not a healing ability; it was the power to rewind time for its target. It recovered the health gauge as a sort of pseudohealing, but it would also cancel out things like changes in Enhanced Armaments, and if it hit any stage objects, it would set their status back as well. Destroyed items were returned to their original state; giant long-horned beetles reverted to eggs.

  Obviously, in the normal course of things, Frost Horn would have realized something was up and never approached the egg. But the frost drifting thickly through the air blocked vision and hid Chiyuri’s target. As a result, Frost Horn followed Haruyuki’s invitation and charged right into the egg.

  “Eeeeeaaaaaah!!”

  The shrill scream of the man and the angry cry of the giant bug receded deep into the western woods, in the direction of Shinjuku Central Park. The Frosted Circle went with them, and their surroundings soon enough returned to the original brightness.

  Tourmaline Shell stared dumbfounded at his partner’s flight before turning back with a gasp and resting his eyes on Haruyuki and Chiyuri in turn. “I’ll get vengeance on Horn’s behalf! C-come and get meeeee!!”

  And, of course, they did.

  “Nice work!”

  Beaming, Chiyuri thrust her right fist forward and Haruyuki bumped it with his own before sliding slowly onto one of the benches lined up in the hallway of the top floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. He let out a long sigh and, after disconnecting from the global net for the time being, turned a dazed face out at space.

  It wasn’t as though anything other than burst points had been at stake; they had just finished a normal duel, but he was ridiculously tired somehow. It was probably because he had pushed himself into intense hand-to-hand ground combat, a way of fighting so unlike his usual style.

  Honestly, the stress of not being able to fly was like having no water in the desert, despite the fact that around the beginning of the first term there had been a period where he couldn’t use his wings for more than a week. Yet that experience seemed to have just increased his yearning for flight all the more.

  And that’s how it was for Haruyuki, who was still only in his first year as a Burst Linker. So for her, having been in this world for more than six years, it was no wonder she burned with a nearly mad passion for the sky. Although it was impossible to even get a sense of this fire from her normal calm demeanor…

  “Hey! What are you spacing out about?”

  Bopped on the head, Haruyuki hurriedly blinked several times in quick succession.

  Chiyuri, next to him on the bench, had her cheeks puffed out and was glaring at him sideways. Apparently, she had started talking to him, and he had just let it slip right by.

  “S-sorry. What did you say?”

  “I asked you if you wanna go one more time!”

  He looked at the clock display in the lower right of his field of view: Only a few minutes had passed since they’d come up to the observation deck. This was par for the course given that a Burst Linker duel ended in at most a mere 1.8 seconds in the real world, but Haruyuki thought about it for a moment before replying. “Hmm, I kinda think that if we stay here and wait for another fight, it’s just gonna be Horn and Shell again, y’know? But I guess that’s fine, too.”

  Rolling her cat-shaped eyes exaggeratedly, Chiyuri also shook her head. “Yeah, going up against the same team would be kinda boring. But, like, we came all this way together; it seems like a waste to just do solo fights.”

  If she had been in her in-school local net avatar, she would’ve been twitching her large cat ears. Or at least that was the look on her face as she fell into thought. “Oh! I’ve got it!” She abruptly clapped her hands together. “We’re right here in Shinjuku—let’s call my big sister! She’s at a high school in Shibuya, right? It’s just one station, maybe she’d come.”

  Haruyuki was the tiniest bit surprised. Because the “big sister” Chiyuri was talking about was the same “her” who had popped into Haruyuki’s mind earlier.

  Her name was Sky Raker. A senior Burst Linker and old friend of Kuroyukihime who had joined—or rather returned to—Nega Nebulus just two months before.

  The reason why Chiyuri called this Burst Linker her “big sis” was exceedingly simple. Chiyuri’s last name was Kurashima, the “shima” of which meant “island,” while Raker’s real name was Fuko Kurasaki, the “saki” of which meant “peninsula.” When they exchanged name tags at their first face-to-face meeting in the real, Haruyuki had casually made the offhand comment, “Shima and saki together. You must be long-lost sisters, huh? Ha-ha-ha!” And that was where that started.

  Without waiting for Haruyuki’s response, Chiyuri started typing out a mail to this elder “sister,” inviting her to join them. As his childhood friend pecked at her holokeyboard somewhat awkwardly, Haruyuki struggled with whether or not to tell her to stop. Because he had the feeling first and foremost that Raker would definitely decline the invitation.

  Although she had in fact returned to the Legion, Sky Raker had not been released from the criminal consciousness that bound her. To that very day, she deeply regretted how, long, long ago, she had left the Legion in such a way as to abandon her leader, Kuroyukihime. Chiyuri, of course, also knew about all of this. She was most likely trying in her own way to knock on the locked door to Raker’s heart.

  Which is why Haruyuki once again closed the mouth he had opened.

  A few seconds later, when Chiyuri had finished typing out the mail, she connected her Neurolinker to the global net for an instant to send it. She disconnected again, waited for a bit, and then connected once more. After getting Raker’s reply and cutting free from the network one last time, she glanced over the text of it.

  “…She says sorry,” Chiyuri murmured, lifting her face and smiling slightly, and Haruyuki offered the words he had readied.

  “Raker’s in high school and all; she has to be superbusy on weekdays. She’s supposed to be in the Territories this weekend. We’ll see her then.”

  “…Yeah, you’re right.” His childhood friend heaved a sigh before smiling broadly, as if changing emotional gears. She said in an abruptly spirited voice, “So, okay, how about we fight solo once apiece?”

  “Hmm, I kinda feel satisfied with that fight before. But if you’re still wanting to go, I’ll totally join you, of course.”

  At this response, Chiyuri nodded, a happy look coming to her face, this time from her heart. “Okay. We got to have a fun, cool win, so I’m good for today, too. Aah, that really did feel great!”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He returned her smile and reflected on the earlier tag-team match.

  He was quite pleased at simply having won in a contest of strength, avatar to avatar, but more exhilarating than that was that it had been a strategic victory, where they’d taken full advantage of the characteristics of the stage. Not to mention that that kind of upset victory—turning around a bad situation—almost never
happened. The eruption of the Gallery when the battle had been decided was proof of that.

  Of course, this did make the regret of the side taking the hit all that much worse.

  Frost Horn somehow managed to shake free of the hot pursuit of the enormous long-horned beetle and return to the battlefield, only to face a concentrated attack in short order. And almost as if Chiyuri had also remembered Frost Horn’s magnificent parting words at the same time as Haruyuki, they both spurted with laughter.

  “Pft, heh-heh! ‘Next time, we’ll be the ones dropping on you! From the top of Tokyo Skytree to kick you in the heads!’ We’d totally see it coming and step aside, and then they’d crash into the ground like that, game over.”

  “But, no, wait, even before that, how’re they gonna get up there? It’s like two hundred meters from the observation deck to the antenna at the very top, and to begin with, are there even social cameras…that high up…” As he spoke, a thought abruptly flashed up in the back of his mind and Haruyuki’s mouth decelerated.

  The thing he had been trying to remember right before they were challenged to the duel…The bit about the first export of the social camera technology outside of Japan. The memory of something he had caught only a glimpse of in the headline news finally came back to him.

  Chiyuri cocked her head to one side at Haruyuki’s sudden silence. “What’s wrong, Haru?”

  “Oh, uh, n-no, it’s nothing.” He shook his head vigorously, and Chiyuri shrugged before leaping to her feet.

  “Okay, then! Let’s get tea somewhere before heading home. It’s all sunshine for you, huh, Professor Arita?! You’re not stuck with me all awkward on the way home after losing pathetically!”

  He could talk about games forever, but this type of line never failed to make his brain flicker.

  “N-no, it’d be fine. I mean, I don’t care about losing. It’s fine. Really,” he mumbled awkwardly.