The Red Storm Princess Read online

  Because the only parts of what was formerly Haruyuki’s condo remaining were the floor and the pillars, he could see the light that led to the exterior several dozen meters ahead. Zigzagging over the collapsing floor and pulverizing the falling lumps of concrete with his fists and his head, he glanced up to check the special-attack gauge below his health bar.

  Neither the damage he was inflicting nor sustaining were very serious, but perhaps because stage destruction points were also being counted, his gauge was shining about 20 percent green. Which meant—

  He could fly!!

  Haruyuki took a deep breath and concentrated his power in both shoulders. The metal fins folded up on his back deployed with a crisp click. He vibrated the fins at a high frequency and accelerated his dash.

  “Geronimoooooooo!!” Crying out, he turned to the gray sky approaching before him and threw himself headlong into a dive.

  Haruyuki’s place was very near the top of the skyscraper complex. Therefore, the moment he leapt from the building, the city suddenly lay spread out before his eyes, from Koenji to Shinjuku. It was a picturesque panorama, but like his own condo, the buildings had all been transformed into drab affairs, steel frames jutting out of cement. So this was probably a Weathered stage. He was pretty sure its attributes were: breaks easily, dusty, and sudden gusts.

  Mulling this over, Haruyuki eased up on the acceleration of his metal wings and hovered in the sky. He glanced over at his special-attack gauge; there was only a little left. At this rate, he should have had enough for three minutes of continuous flight.

  When he looked back, the condo’s enormous tower was in the process of splitting in half at the middle, another stage in its progressive, merciless collapse.

  “Aaah…My house…,” he muttered unconsciously. Of course, that “house” was just made of polygons generated by the system, but this was the first time his own home had been destroyed in a duel.

  “Honestly, this is ridiculous.” Shaking his helmeted head, Haruyuki watched the condominium reduced to a mountain of rubble below him. The Red King had apparently gotten caught up in the massive destruction she herself had initiated and was nowhere to be seen. So even a fortress avatar was helpless before this kind of devastation.

  He cocked his head to the side, wondering exactly what she had been trying to accomplish, and started his descent when he noticed something and shuddered.

  Scarlet Rain’s health gauge had not dropped. Although it was somewhat less full, on the order of 30 percent less, it wasn’t an amount that could properly be called damage. And her special-attack gauge was shining brightly, fully charged.

  Of course. Destroying such an enormous geographical landmark would have given her a huge bonus. Which meant that the Red King’s reckless and random missile fire hadn’t been intended to disrupt Haruyuki’s attack on her back or to entangle him in the collapse.

  All of a sudden, several rays of red light surged out from the rubble under his nose. At the same time, a shrill voice shouted, “Heat Blast Saturation!!”

  A strange sort of resonance pulsated the air, a thunderous sound that nearly burst Haruyuki’s eardrums as he watched a line of red fire pierce the ruins of the condo, stretching straight up into the sky.

  “Eeeeaaaah!!” he cried, vibrating his left wing as hard as he could in an attempt to avoid the beam with a tailspin dive. But…

  The field of fire was just too huge. Unable to completely avoid the beam, which was basically as wide as he was tall, Silver Crow hit the flickering thermosphere with his left arm. There was a sizzling sound just below his elbow, and his lower arm steamed out of existence.

  His HP bar plummeted 15 percent, and he was racked by an unrelenting, scorching heat. But Haruyuki was largely unaware of either of these things.

  Because he was focused on the heat beam passing right by him, he didn’t see it extend toward the east of the stage and blow away the top half of the Shinjuku government office towering over the area three hundred meters above the ground.

  “No way…” The same stunned words he had uttered too many times in this battle slid once more from Haruyuki’s mouth. Jaw agape beneath the silver surface of his helmet, he shifted his gaze and stared at the remains of his condo.

  The Red King emerged majestically from an enormous gash cut through the rubble. The beautiful ruby armor covering her body was perfectly untouched. The thrusters on her back and undercarriage glittered lightly with the emission of flames, and white smoke trailed from the slits in the gun of her left arm.

  “Ooh, you’re flying! High in the sky!” the Red King half sang, looking up at Silver Crow with round eyes from the gap in her front armor. “I always wanted to try this stuff, antiaircraft fire. Looks like so much fun in sci-fi movies and whatnot. Just sends everything flying all over the place.”

  Ka-chak.

  With a spectacular metallic clack, the missile casings on both her shoulders flung wide, her right main weapon came up, and the angle of the four machine guns on her front changed.

  Trembling violently, Haruyuki recalled scenes like this from movies and anime. The tiny mecha soldier tries to slip past the enemy fortress’s overwhelming curtain of antiaircraft fire and get closer. They were almost always shot down like little bugs and exploded, calling out a lover’s name or something.

  I’ll go with “Kuroyukihime,” then. Although that’s just a nickname. But still, her real name would be embarrassing.

  While he was busy losing himself in this kind of escapist thinking, the enemy’s main armament began to charge, rumbling deeply. What looked to be a hundred small missiles rose up from the launchers, seeker heads glittering.

  In contrast with his enemy’s special-attack gauge, which was full again—likely from the bonus earned by destroying the government office—Haruyuki’s had less than 5 percent left. He would probably be able to fly at full power for a couple minutes at best. It wasn’t his style, but he was in a position where his only choice was to bet everything on a simple, straightforward suicide assault.

  “Well, let me just tell you that everybody knows it’s always the lone mecha that brings down the enormous battleship!” Psyching himself up, Haruyuki took a dash position in the sky.

  “As if a mecha with a perv in it could do anything like that, stupid!” The Red King spat her comeback at him and added in a shriek, “Hailstorm Domination!!”

  Zzgrrm! Tat tat tat tat tat! Krr krr krr krr!

  Three kinds of gun reports thundered simultaneously as her main weapons, the missiles, and the machine gun unloaded as one. It was basically a “greatest hits” look at the sorts of long-range anti-aerial assaults that had been causing Haruyuki such grief. Last week and the week before, too, he had been forced out and shot down by firepower not even a tenth of this.

  And yet, for some reason, it was only now that he wasn’t scared or disheartened. Maybe it was complete apathy in the face of an enemy so much more powerful than himself, but for the first time in an incredibly long time, Haruyuki was overtaken by heat, as if all the blood in his body were boiling. And that heat was excitement for the duel.

  “Nnngyaaah!!” With a war cry, he first dashed in midair to the right, somehow dodging the superheated beam of the main weapons. If he got hit dead-on with that, he’d sizzle up instantly. The beam narrowly missed him, passing immediately by his side to open up a huge hole in either Park Tower or the NS Building.

  But his enemy seemed to have anticipated this maneuver. Countless small missiles closed in ahead of him, seekers twinkling.

  Taking a deep breath, Haruyuki put everything he had into super-high-speed maneuvers. To draw the batch of missiles flying in a straight line, he turned back sharply, more than ninety degrees. Rocked by the explosion of the missiles that had lost their homing target, he lured off the next group, avoiding that detonation as well. Silver Crow flew on, carving out a zigzag in the sky like a UFO, countless explosions blooming behind him.

  Strangely, he felt he could clearly make out the trajec
tory of the missiles and the barrage of the machine guns. He wasn’t sure if this was the fruit of his training in that white room or not…

  At the apex of the limit of his high-speed flight, Haruyuki felt suddenly deeply annoyed with himself. Why couldn’t he have been moving like this in the Territory Battles at the end of every week? Why, when just a lone rifle was pointed at him, did his legs—no, his wings—cramp up and leave him grounded? If he was going to chalk it up to pressure, he should have been under much greater pressure now, engaged in a one-on-one battle with the notorious Red King.

  I’m this fast. I can fly like this. So why do I end up eating bullets like a total klutz when it really counts? I need to get stronger. I have to be stronger, up my levels, and then she’ll—

  “..…Ngh!” He gritted his teeth beneath his helmet, and his flight speed decelerated slightly, such that he failed to trace a single escape route. The remaining thirty or so missiles were converging from all directions ahead of him. At his back was the barrage of machine-gun fire. And on the ground, Scarlet Rain’s left main weapon had finished charging and was beginning to track him.

  “D-dammit!”

  Haruyuki kicked down a missile closing in before him, blowing off the tips of his toes in the explosion. Using the reactive force, he altered the angle of his body and dropped into a sink-or-swim dive straight down. But the enormous maw of the main weapon was waiting there for him.

  At that moment, a stormy wind blew across the battlefield, a geographical effect of the Weathered stage. A large cloud of dust rolled up from the naked concrete and the surface of the ground, and his vision was instantly obscured to a single shade of gray. The missiles around him lost their target and were forced to detonate one after another.

  This is it!!

  Haruyuki opened his eyes, focused his entire being on the ruby color glittering in the depths of the sand storm, and plummeted in a spiral.

  The beam of the main weapon fired, piercing the center of this trajectory, but burning nothing other than empty space.

  “Aaaaah!!” Battle cry torn from his lips, Haruyuki changed his posture and became a streak of light, plunging forward feet first. He was betting everything on a Kick to the gap between the two missile launchers he could vaguely make out on Scarlet Rain. If he managed a critical hit, he could come back from this.

  But.

  “Wha—?!”

  As the tips of his remaining toes pointed swordlike converged on her, the enormous fortress-shaped avatar suddenly fell to pieces. The casings and main weaponry separated and disengaged along with the armor plates. The slender girl’s avatar appeared at the center and regarded him before sidestepping like quicksilver and avoiding Silver Crow’s Kick.

  Haruyuki drilled a large hole into the ground with a grinding crash, falling awkwardly, and something struck his helmet with a clunk. Turning his face, he saw the muzzle of a small gun. Scarlet Rain’s real body, the tiny girl avatar, leveled a crimson pistol at Haruyuki with her delicate right hand.

  The second she avoided that Kick so easily, I lost. Although he admitted this in his heart, Haruyuki had a hard time surrendering and barked: “You think a toy like that’s gonna pierce my armor?”

  Conveyed only through the lenses of two round eyes, a smile blossomed clearly across the Red King’s mask. “If I said that this gun is my most powerful weapon, would you believe me, big brother?”

  Haruyuki took a deep breath, exhaled all at once, and held up both hands—even though his right hand had already been completely severed.

  “I believe you. You win, Scarlet Rain.”

  The Red King laughed once again and asked, “Then will you do me a favor?”

  “Huh? A favor…?”

  She couldn’t be asking him to betray the Black Legion. That was definitely off the table. Haruyuki panicked in his mind, but her response was completely out of the realm of the expected.

  Suddenly threatening, the girl demanded haughtily, “Let me meet your guardian. In the real world…Both of us, flesh and blood.”

  2

  A bright January 22. Thursday, 12:05 PM.

  Rubbing eyes that hadn’t gotten enough sleep, Haruyuki walked down the hallway on the first floor of Umesato Junior High School toward the student cafeteria.

  The night before, he had, in the end, slept in his own room while his second cousin Tomoko—or rather, the Red King in that guise—slept on the sofa bed in the living room. But he clearly lacked the intestinal fortitude to sleep soundly in such a situation.

  What exactly was the Red King’s objective? Why put on the sweet younger sister act at first and bake cookies? And what was she planning to discuss when she met Kuroyukihime, otherwise known as the Black King?

  Although he tried to seriously contemplate these and other questions, no matter what he did, the scene in the bath kept repeating in Haruyuki’s mind. Aaaah, that makes me a real perv, but I can’t help it. I’m a thirteen-year-old boy, after all. But I have Kuroyukihime…

  Dawn broke with him still agonizing, so Haruyuki tossed back a breakfast of cereal, trying not to wake the deeply sleeping Red King, and left the house early. He managed to make it through his morning classes somehow with the help of the alarm on his Neurolinker, but as lunch break drew near, he roused himself a bit through self-interest, excited at the prospect of seeing Kuroyukihime again that day, enough that he flew out of the classroom the second the bell rang.

  Stepping into the still nearly deserted cafeteria, he weaved around several long tables that were lined up and practically ran into the adjacent lounge.

  She was seated at the farthest of the elegant, white, round tables arranged in a circle. Haruyuki forgot to breathe as he stared at the black-clad silhouette perched there. She almost looked as though she was glowing faintly, radiating softly from the midwinter sunlight falling on her as it poured in through the window at her back.

  He had seen this same scene countless times over these last three months, but the painful throbbing that filled his heart every time showed not the slightest sign of abating. He even felt as if the fact that this tableau, a perfect painting, existed again today was akin to a miracle.

  Resting her chin in her hands gently, looking down at an enormous book that rested upon the table, the girl called Kuroyukihime finally lifted her head soundlessly. The soft sun sparkled as it slid along the long black hair flowing over her shoulders. Her beautiful face broke into a light smile, a ring of flowers blooming in an unsullied snowy plain.

  “Hey. Morning, Haruyuki.”

  Even in the midst of his bliss at hearing his name spoken in her low, silky voice once more, Haruyuki felt ashamed recalling his recent and copious clumsy defeats, so as he walked over to the table, he bowed his head.

  “Good morning! You, uh—”

  You look beautiful again today.

  Was what he desperately wanted to say, but he was completely incapable of uttering anything like that using his actual voice. He was forced to let something else emerge from his mouth. “You’re early again today, huh? I’ve never been able to get here before you.”

  “It’s only natural. The seventh-grade classrooms are on the third floor, and the eighth-grade classrooms are on the second floor, after all.” Her face clear, she shrugged lightly.

  After pulling out the chair next to her and sitting down, Haruyuki replied, “I—I guess that makes sense. So then every day, you—”

  “And rather than make you wait, I prefer to wait myself. That way, I can remember every instant of this precious time, right from the moment you appear at the entrance.” She smiled again, her lips the petals of a black lily opening.

  Joyful and daunted in equal measure that those words and that smile were directed at his fat, ugly self, Haruyuki slowly exhaled through pudgy lips the breath he’d momentarily held.

  I seriously can’t believe it. That this dreamlike, amazing upperclassman and the demonic Spartan instructor in the Accelerated World are actually the same person.

  He
personally would rather have spent as much time as possible with the former, but he expected that wasn’t likely to happen today. Once he explained the situation spilling over from last night, there was no doubt that the gentle Kuroyukihime would immediately transform into the terrifying water lily of black death.

  He was just thinking how he wanted to stare at her for even a second longer, like a love-struck little girl, when she opened her mouth.

  “That reminds me. When you called last night. What was that? You suddenly stop talking in the middle of the conversation, and then you abruptly say good night and hang up. I believe…I believe you were saying something about the Red King?”

  “Oh…um…right…”

  During that one second when I was silent, I was fighting the Red King herself.

  She wouldn’t believe him if he just blurted out something like that. Because the level-nine Kings no longer had any need to earn Burst Points in normal duels to level up, they almost never appeared on the battlefield.

  With no other options, Haruyuki resigned himself to telling her everything. The whole kit and caboodle, from start to finish, beginning with the “Big brother! You’re home!” part—although he’d have to omit the problematic scene in the bath.

  Several minutes later.

  Kuroyukihime, her expression now a mixture of 30 percent amazement and 70 percent anger, raised a tightly clenched fist into the air while slowly inhaling.

  That fool! Goddamn her!

  She very nearly shouted in anger and pounded the table but checked herself at the last minute because there were several other students carrying lunch trays into the lounge now. They shot glances at Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime, the usual expressions of disbelief despite the fact that it was a familiar sight by now, and occupied tables a slight distance away.

  Unlike Haruyuki, Kuroyukihime paid no attention to the other students as she took several deep breaths, fist still poised five centimeters or so above the table. Finally, she brought the hand down with a thud.

  “I really want to…I want to say, you should have seen through her right from the start, but…a social engineering attack like this is certainly beyond all expectation. And carried out by the Red King herself no less.”