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  Given the low latitude, the sky was already colored a deep blue even at this hour. Kuroyukihime stared out over the exotic area, ambling along.

  Occasionally, she spotted Umesato students among the bright colors of the souvenirs for sale. They looked like they were having fun as they squealed, weighing their budgets and the items before them, but Kuroyukihime lived alone even though she was still in junior high and had no need to buy souvenirs for her family. Although she did intend to choose a joint gift from her and Megumi to the current seventh-grade representative on the council, that was the only purchase she really had to make.

  Thus, she was ready to put all her powers of search and judgment, along with her entire budget, into a souvenir for her lone nonobligatory souvenir receiver—Arita, of course—but he had requested a sata andagi (an Okinawan doughnut) thirty centimeters round…a request whose parameters she was unsure were extremely difficult or not difficult at all. Walking down the street, she peeked into the andagi shops she spotted along the way, but of course, none of them were selling the item in question.

  As she wondered whether she would have no choice but to do a search on the global net, even though the “found it myself” sense of being a hard-won prize would go down slightly, and how long the cake would keep anyway, she looked to one side and locked eyes with the grinning Megumi.

  Unconsciously, she pressed a hand to her chest and nearly took a step back before clearing her throat lightly. “Megumi, don’t you have to pick out some souvenirs?”

  “Nah. I mean, I’m gonna buy something for my family at the airport on the last day, and unfortunately, I don’t have a little lord awaiting my return to Tokyo.”

  “R-right. So then…Hmm. Right, how about we do this? Why don’t we buy each other something, and then give them to each other once we’re back at school?” she proposed airily.

  But Megumi’s face abruptly lit up. “That’s a pretty good idea, for you, Hime.”

  “‘For me’?” The phrase caught Kuroyukihime, but Megumi seemed to pay it no mind as she continued.

  “But, Hime, that’s basically a surprise present, right? So then, we can’t make that happen shopping together like this. How about we go our separate ways for now and meet up at the entrance to the hotel in half an hour, at four?”

  “R-right. Okay, let’s do that.” Kuroyukihime nodded.

  Megumi quickly disappeared into the hustle and bustle, with a grin and the words, “I’m gonna find something that’ll surprise you more than anything else this year!”

  After a moment or two of standing frozen at the slightly unexpected reaction of her friend, Kuroyukihime started walking slowly again.

  If she excluded the relationships she had formed in the Accelerated World, Megumi Wakamiya was without a doubt the person she was closest with at Umesato Junior High. Ever since the day two years earlier when they began school and Megumi started talking with her, they had never once fought. And although she did dislike how overly physically affectionate Megumi was, they had always had a good relationship.

  But maybe that was because she had never once tried to get inside Megumi’s head, Kuroyukihime realized belatedly. She did call her in the evenings sometimes, and they occasionally hung out on weekends, but they had never visited each other’s houses. In Kuroyukihime’s case, this was because she didn’t want to discuss why she lived alone in a town house in Asagaya. But now that she was thinking about it, Megumi had never invited Kuroyukihime to her own house over the last two years. In fact, she basically never brought up the subject of her family at all. About all that Kuroyukihime knew was that Megumi lived in Honcho, Nakano Ward, and that she had a father, a mother, and an older sister, a family structure that closely resembled Kuroyukihime’s own.

  At the end of the second term of sixth grade, Kuroyukihime had caused an incident far beyond the level of a child’s tantrum and had been expelled from her family home in Shirokanedai, Minato Ward. Her parents set a consulting lawyer as her sole supervisor and seemed to think that fulfilled their obligations as her guardians, given that they had essentially cut off all contact with her.

  She had all this baggage, so she had been imagining—with absolutely no basis in reality—that Megumi lived happily and warmly with her close-knit family, but there wasn’t a family in the world that didn’t have any problems. Even Arita, whom she had discovered last fall and made her child, had divorced parents, and his mother, who had custody of him, didn’t come home until late at night, leaving him to spend every evening alone.

  So perhaps what lay beneath Megumi’s constant smile was a kept secret all this time. As Kuroyukihime mulled this over, she peeked into a shop with a small showcase of shell work accessories on the left side of the road.

  It was in that instant. Skreeeee!! The sharp sound of dry thunder assaulted Kuroyukihime’s mind.

  It was a sound she was used to hearing, the noise of the BB program installed in her Neurolinker accelerating her consciousness automatically a thousand times faster than reality. In other words, someone was challenging Kuroyukihime—the Burst Linker Black Lotus.

  If this were in Tokyo, Kuroyukihime’s mind would have switched over to duel mode without even a tenth of a second of lag, thanks to instincts honed through enormous battle experience, but now she couldn’t help stiffening up just a little.

  Whatever else, this was Okinawa. The edge of the edge of the social camera network. The literal borderland.

  Given that currently, 99 percent of all Burst Linkers were concentrated in the twenty-three wards of Tokyo, there shouldn’t have been any challengers showing up here. Or at least, that was her expectation before leaving for the trip. Even so, just in case, she had accelerated and checked the matching list when they landed at the airport in Naha and again passing through the city of Nago on the bus, but she had been the only one in the area. After that, she had relaxed her guard and left her Neurolinker connected to the global net, but here she was now, challenged in Henoko, not even close to being a large town.

  Precisely because Kuroyukihime was a veteran, she was stunned by this development. But by the time the text HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER flamed up in her field of view and the world around her began to change, she had completely switched mental modes.

  First, the tourists and shop clerks filling the street disappeared all at once. Then the shops on both sides turned into walls, piles of gray rocks. The walls were not new; they were crumbling in places and covered in moss and vines. At her feet, the earth was covered in a fine layer of white sand mixed with gravel.

  At the same time as the stage finished generating, the word FIGHT!! bounced up in front of her eyes in flaming letters and then disappeared.

  Before glancing down at her own transformation into her jet-black duel avatar, Kuroyukihime checked the level of her opponent in the upper right of her field of view. The number there was five.

  She breathed a sigh of unconscious relief. If the number engraved there had been nine, it would have been an ugly all-out war to survive, with no regard for appearances. She would have had to throw out everything she had, even her sealed special attacks. Getting control of her shallow breathing, she confirmed the feel of the sand-covered ground with the tips of her sharp swords.

  “This is…the Ancient Castle stage? But something’s different. Maybe a change particular to the Okinawa area,” she murmured.

  “This ain’t an Ancient Castle! It’s the Okinawan Fortress stage!” As if her monologue had been overheard, a powerful shout came from above her and off to one side.

  Looking up, she spotted two human shapes—avatars standing on the gray castle wall with their backs to the evening sky. The one in front wore armor reminiscent of the sea, a blue tinged with green. The one standing to the rear was a vivid coral color. Both were female-type avatars with designs that emphasized curves.

  Since it didn’t seem that her opponent was going to come charging in at her right away, Kuroyukihime glanced at the corner of her display. The avatar name beneat
h the enemy health gauge read: LAGOON DOLPHIN LEVEL 5, probably the name of the sea-colored avatar. Since it was a one-on-one duel, the coral avatar would have been the Gallery. At the moment, there was no way of learning her name or level, but Kuroyukihime could tell one thing at the very least. Normally, the Gallery couldn’t come within a ten-meter circle of the duelers, but since the coral one was obviously quite close to the sea color, they were either parent and child, or Legion members, or both.

  “Hmm.” When Kuroyukihime let this slip quietly, the sea-colored Lagoon Dolphin leapt down rather forcefully from the top of the castle wall. It was over five meters tall, so there was the risk of taking fall damage if she bungled it, but she easily absorbed the impact, the joints of her avatar bending the bare minimum.

  “Ah! W-wait, Ruka!” the coral one still on top of the wall cried out somewhat pathetically, and then hesitated several times on the very edge of the wall before jumping down with a hup! She landed hard on her butt, but since she was just a spectator, she didn’t have a health gauge to begin with.

  “Furah. [Idiot.]” Dolphin looked at the coral girl brushing herself off as she stood up and shook her head. “Wahji de machokeyo. [Wait up there.]”

  “B-but! You always do that kind of reckless stuff, Ruka—”

  “Kashimashii! Kakidamishi ya sa! Atehmehteh! [Shut up! I’m testing her, right! Duh!]”

  In contrast with the coral avatar, who used standard Japanese, albeit with a southern intonation, Dolphin’s words were fairly hardcore Okinawan dialect; what she was saying was a total mystery to Kuroyukihime.

  The coral put a hand on Dolphin’s shoulder and dropped her voice significantly. “And, Ruka, if you keep using Uchinaguchi, this person’s not going to get anything. And our real objective is—”

  “Ahhh, fine. I get it!” Dolphin shouted, and took a large step into the sandy road, snapped the index finger of her right hand out at Kuroyukihime, and finally uttered something intelligible. “You’re one of the students staying at that hotel on a school trip, yeah!”

  Kuroyukihime glanced behind her to see that the resort hotel where the Umesato Junior High students were staying had been transformed into massive stone ruins. She turned to face Dolphin once more and nodded before responding with a question. “And you two are not tourists. So then you’re Burst Linkers who live in this area?”

  “Atehme—I mean, o’course! I’m real Uchinachu, going back generations!”

  “Oh! I—I basically am, too.” The coral girl behind Dolphin popped her right hand up into the air, and Kuroyukihime sank into thought.

  Brain Burst 2039, the program required to become a Burst Linker, had been distributed to a hundred elementary school students living in the city of Tokyo eight years earlier, in the year 2039, just as the name implied. Since the requisite for copying and installing was a wired connection, the children obtaining the program were necessarily limited to those who lived within the twenty-three wards. Kuroyukihime, with seven years of play experience, didn’t know of a single Burst Linker living outside of the city.

  However, to speak of the possibility, it could happen that someone who became a Burst Linker moved out of Tokyo to Hokkaido or even Okinawa. No matter how high-level a warrior a Burst Linker might have been, in the real world, they were just elementary and middle school kids who couldn’t live on their own. They were powerless to refuse to move because of a parent’s job transfer or a divorce. And Burst Linkers who left for the borderlands of the Accelerated World in this way faced without exception nothing other than a gentle annihilation.

  Or that was what Kuroyukihime had always assumed. With no one around to be your opponent in a duel, even if you had reached level four and could dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field, you certainly wouldn’t be able to hunt Enemies alone in any reliable way. And if you couldn’t replenish your points, then it was obvious that at some point, you would use up the stock you’d brought from Tokyo and end up with a forced uninstall.

  However, the sea- and coral-colored duel avatars standing before her now said they were born and raised in Okinawa. There were two theories that could explain their existence. A Burst Linker who moved from Tokyo to Okinawa created a child in this area and helped them grow by giving them their own points until they were at a level where they could hunt Enemies. Or Tokyo wasn’t the only place the BB program was distributed in 2039. Either way, she couldn’t help but have her curiosity piqued.

  “Interesting.” The word tumbled from Kuroyukihime’s lips, and Lagoon Dolphin seemed to misinterpret the meaning behind it.

  “Oh! You’re into it! Wohkay! So I’ll ask ya to go one round with us!”

  Gesturing to the coral kid behind her with a wave, she spread her legs apart, lowered her stance, and readied her hands in front of her. From the daring form, apparently a striking-style blue type, a gust of fighting spirit blew up like the roar of the ocean wind.

  Kuroyukihime unconsciously smiled beneath her mirrored goggles. Interesting, she repeated soundlessly to herself, with a different meaning than before.

  She herself had no set “ready stance” for the start of a duel, but to match her opponent, she brought the sword of her left hand up in front and that of her right down at her hip as she leaned forward.

  Perhaps sensing something, from over ten meters away, the coral girl held both hands to her mouth and shouted, “B-be careful, Ruka! Your opponent’s level nine, you know!”

  “Heh! That’s no big deal! Just two different from Master!”

  This exchange set Kuroyukihime thinking once more. It appeared that these girls did not know what level nine meant in the Accelerated World. It was not simply two higher than level seven. They were prisoners with the name King, bound by the cruel rule of sudden death.

  She took a breath and brought her tangential thoughts back in line. Once she had set foot in the stage, there was only the intensity of the duel.

  “Right, levels are just numbers. Show no fear. Come at me with all your might!” she shouted sharply.

  Lagoon Dolphin’s eye lens, all smooth flowing lines, glittered fiercely. “No need to tell me!”

  Her feet kicked hard against the ground, white sand shooting up into the air. She instantly closed the nearly seven meters between them with a movement that was almost like sliding. She wouldn’t have been able to produce that kind of propulsive force with a single step from just her original avatar specs. Kuroyukihime also saw clear evidence of training in the attack that flowed smoothly out from the dash.

  “Haah!” With a cry, her right arm shot out at chest level. The strain energy transmitted from hip to shoulder, to elbow, to fist created an almost-visible vortex in the air. In terms of speed alone, it didn’t quite beat the punch of Kuroyukihime’s child and beloved student Silver Crow, but it was slightly better in terms of weight.

  However…

  For Kuroyukihime, it was a simple matter to dodge the straight punch and simultaneously deal real damage to her opponent. She had only to place the sword of her left hand in the punch’s trajectory. The swords of the four limbs of the duel avatar Black Lotus, the embodiment of the attribute of absolute severing, could slice through the hardest armor simply by touching it. The only ones who had ever managed to repel Lotus’s swords without weapons or defensive tools and only the body of their avatar were the “Anomaly,” Graphite Edge, one of the Four Elements of the former Nega Nebulus; the legendary berserker, the Armor of Catastrophe; and the invincible Green Grandé.

  If Lagoon Dolphin’s right straight collided with Kuroyukihime’s sword, that fist would be easily cut in two, and she would probably lose her right arm up to the shoulder.

  But rather than doing that, Kuroyukihime caught the tough thrust with the flat side of her left hand blade. Although the four swords of her avatar were furnished with absolute cutting power on the blade edge, as payment for that, the flat area was brittle. When she had been at lower levels, any number of enemies aimed for the wide center of her blades to beat and break them. The
technique she had devised through long training in the Unlimited Neutral Field in her youthful days to compensate for that weak point was to catch the opponent’s attack in a spiraling movement, reverse the power vector, and then release them—a reversal technique. She had named it the Way of the Flexible.

  Dolphin’s straight punch only caused a few meager sparks to shoot off when it came into contact with the sword before being swallowed up by a black vortex.

  “Hunh!” Together with Kuroyukihime’s short cry, the attack was repelled 180 degrees, to the rear. Unable to stay on her feet in that spot, the small, lightweight avatar flew over five meters through the air and slammed into the road on her back.

  “Agah! [Ow!]” Although a small cry slipped out, she immediately shot her legs up into the air and got to her feet through the reaction; she seemed fairly strong against hits. Her HP gauge had decreased more than 10 percent, but she didn’t seem to pay that any mind as she charged once more.

  “Sehaah!”

  An even more intense cry preceded a straight thrust with her right fist. To repeat the same technique that had already been perfectly evaded once, only with a different hand, Kuroyukihime wondered if perhaps she had overestimated this girl a little as she moved to catch the fist with the Way of the Flexible once more.

  And then Dolphin’s entire body sank down, and she had no sooner spun around like a drill on the axis of her body than she was launching a super-low roundhouse kick that used the momentum of that spin with her right foot.

  A surface-skimming kick after a punch, to create a feint. If she had used this attack after judging that Black Lotus’s body balance must be weak from her unusual form, then she had fairly good instincts. There was no time to evade the kick closing in as it shot white sand into the air. That said, if the sword of Kuroyukihime’s left foot were hit directly, even if the blow wasn’t strong enough to break it, there was still the possibility of a fall. And unfortunately, she was still in the process of studying the Way of the Flexible in regard to her feet.