Elements, Page 4

  “Huh? Um…” Unable to move his hand, Haruyuki moved his eyes back and forth between the plug and the girl. He felt like he had no choice but to insert the plug into his own Neurolinker. But that would mean a direct, wired connection, and directing in a public place was basically a declaration that the relationship between the two parties was far from casual.

  It had been over spring break of fifth grade, and he would never forget it. One of the clownier members of his class had played the prank of suddenly connecting his Neurolinker to that of the most beautiful girl in class, who was sitting with her back to him, and the girl had burst into tears. It had been the absolute worst. Directing meant that sort of thing, and basically the only person Haruyuki was daring enough to direct with in public was the Black King.

  Right. She reminds me of Kuroyukihime somehow. Not in looks, but like attitude? Or that intensity? The moment this thought crossed his mind, Haruyuki reached out and grabbed the plug. This’ll probably be the last time I direct with someone other than Kuroyukihime, huh? he thought as he pushed it into the connector on his Neurolinker.

  The wired connection warning flashed in red in his view and disappeared. A second later, a delicate, sweet—and yet firm—neurospeak voice echoed inside his brain. “Right now, I am considering two possibilities. You are an impostor who is an extremely good actor, and you deliberately ran into me in order to crack me in the real…or you are a genuine klutz.”

  “Uh.” After an initial stupid utterance, Haruyuki hurriedly followed up with actual words. “The second one, without a doubt. But I can’t really think of how to prove that to you…”

  When he thought about it, saying that was already pretty klutzy. Since a person couldn’t be deliberately clumsy, knocking over his glass of orange juice or something at that moment would only serve to deepen his interlocutor’s suspicion and wouldn’t be proof of any kind. He pushed the tips of his index fingers together and frantically racked his brain until finally it output the following words.

  “Let’s see. I don’t have any proof of this, either, but the reason my point balance is in serious danger is because I kinda lost it when my points reached three hundred, and I sort of hit the level-up button in some kind of trance.”

  He glanced at the girl’s face once more. For a while, the expression on the face of the person who was probably Aqua Current didn’t flicker, but then she finally nodded lightly.

  “If that’s true, I can understand to a certain extent. Silver Crow’s kicked out an average win rate of seventy percent or more these last two weeks. I thought it was strange that you’d suddenly be in a near-death state.”

  “Y-you know me?!” Unconsciously, he leaned forward, and his stomach hit the edge of the table, causing the glass with a third or so of juice still left in it to rock back and forth from the impact.

  The girl, of course, reached out a hand to catch it. “The only one in the Accelerated World who hasn’t heard the rumors about you is you.”

  “Huh? Th-th-that’s— I’m not really that…” Haruyuki scratched his head bashfully.

  The cute neurospeak voice continued to flow into his hearing: “The only flying avatar. Looks like the brainy type, loses his cool surprisingly easily. Bad at close-range fights with female-shaped duel avatars. Uses sly methods, but not actually all that together.” Haruyuki stiffened, the corners of his mouth still turned up, and the girl glanced at him as she lifted the cup of Darjeeling tea she had ordered. “In any case, you do seem exactly like the rumors, so I’ve decided the incident before was true clumsiness.”

  So is this a happy thing? Yeah, I’m sure it is, he told himself, even as his eyes blurred with sweat for some reason.

  The bespectacled girl set her cup down with a klak, and without seeming to pay any mind to Haruyuki’s internal strife, she straightened up the tiniest bit. “The situation’s become quite irregular, but I should still introduce myself. I’m Aqua Current. As per the contract, I will guard you until your point balance recovers to the minimum safe zone—fifty points.”

  “Oh! O-okay! Thank you! I’m Silver Crow.” He bowed his head. The scene probably looked fairly strange from the outside—some junior high and high school boys and girls were indeed glancing at them intermittently—but he didn’t have the mental leeway to worry about that. For Haruyuki, this mysterious girl was his last lifeline. The sole bouncer in the Accelerated World, an incredible bodyguard with a job failure rate of zero.

  “Huh? Oh. Wait.” Here, Haruyuki was struck by a contradiction he should have noticed first thing. “Um, I’ve actually heard the rumors about you, too, Aqua Current. But—”

  “You can call me Curren.”

  “Th-then call me Crow— No, that’s not what I meant. I totally believed you were a guy…and the friend who told me about you, I guess he thought that, too…”

  Right. Takumu had used the pronoun he for Aqua Current. And even before then, when Haruyuki had been told there was this capable bodyguard, he had pictured a macho guy in a flashy suit—although there weren’t exactly any junior high students like that. He had certainly never imagined a girl in glasses who would fit right in at a bookstore.

  However, Aqua Current aka Curren shrugged lightly, as if to say it was no big deal. “It’s hard to tell from its appearance whether my duel avatar is male or female. And I still haven’t said a single word about me being a girl.”

  “Huh? Wh-what does that mean?” Mouth and eyes gaping, Haruyuki stared hard at Curren’s small face first and then in an extremely rude gesture, at a spot twenty centimeters or so below it. However, she was still cloaked in the stiff fabric of the peacoat, so he couldn’t say either way from just the visual information.

  No, wait. A few minutes ago, I slammed into her head-on. If I just replay the sensation of that, I’ll have the answer. Remember. Come back to me, memory.

  It wasn’t as though these nasty thoughts were being transmitted through the cable, but Curren’s gaze got a fair bit cooler as she spoke again. “It’s five minutes past the scheduled time, but at any rate, we’ll begin the tag-team match now. If you can reach the target number of points here in the Chiyoda area, then that’s that. If we run out of opponents, we’ll move to the neighboring Akihabara area and continue. Do you have any questions?”

  “No, th-th-that’s fine. Th-th-th-thank you!!”

  “Well, then first we’ll register each other’s avatars for tag matches. Connect to the global net and accelerate right away.”

  “O-o-o-okay!” Bobbing his head up and down, Haruyuki first opened the Brain Burst console screen and then registered Aqua Current as a tag-team partner. He saw Curren nod, and then he held down the button to connect to the global net. The connecting display flashed, and the instant it changed to the icon indicating a connection to the world, he shouted in a voice only he could hear, “Burst Link!”

  Finally, the moment of truth, the final battle between life and death. And yet the instant the world froze blue, what occupied Haruyuki’s thoughts was the deeply nagging question, Is this person a boy? A girl?

  There existed two methods of starting a duel. Accelerate while connected to the global net or a local net, open the matching list, select an arbitrary opponent from the list of Burst Linkers connected to the same net, and press the DUEL button. That was one way. The second was to go on standby while registered on the matching list and wait for some other Burst Linker to come along and pick a fight with you. Put simply, it was challenge or be challenged.

  The former had the advantage of allowing the player to select an opponent they were likely to beat, in terms of affinity and personality. But since you had to use one burst point to accelerate first, then naturally if you lost, but even with a draw, the result was a point loss. To make an analogy with the partner fighting games in arcades in the olden days, you were the one to pay the hundred yen, and you lost on top of that.

  In contrast, the latter allowed the player to enjoy the duel without using up any points, but in principle, your opponent
was challenging you after deciding that they had a good chance at winning. It was in fact exhilarating when you could upset that expectation, but in reality, that was fairly hard. In the duels Haruyuki had been in these last two weeks, his win rate when he was the challenger was nearly 80 percent, while it was about 60 percent when he was on standby. Although these were excellent and outstanding numbers for a newbie, the fact that he had Cyan Pile as his partner, with all his experience and knowledge, and the fact that his opponents couldn’t quite manage to deal with his flying ability, the first of its kind in the Accelerated World, played a large part in this. In fact, now that his duel opponents had more or less gotten used to Silver Crow’s wings, his win rate was on the decline.

  For these reasons, Aqua Current’s decision to spend a point and select their first opponent was something Haruyuki could understand. Because he absolutely could not lose this fight. If he lost to an opponent at the same level as he was, the instant those ten points were taken from him, Haruyuki would lose his life as a Burst Linker. Thus, he assumed they would scrutinize the matching list and pick the opponent who offered even a slightly better chance at victory before challenging anyone.

  But when Curren appeared in the blue world of the initial accelerated space, as a glasses-wearing otter avatar that also didn’t allow for a clear identification of gender, she took no notice of Haruyuki’s pink pig avatar as she glanced at the list before casually reaching a hand out to somewhere around the middle of the list. At that point, both avatars were those set for any full dive, so there was no way of finding out the other person’s gender or any other information.

  “Huh?! Um! H-h-hold oooo—” Haruyuki waved black-hooved hands to interrupt.

  Fortunately, the otter’s hand stopped on the verge of touching the window and turned red-framed glasses on him that looked a lot like the ones she wore in real life.

  “Uh, um, the matching list’s in order of level, right? D-d-didn’t you just go to select an opponent right in the middle?”

  “I did. Is that a problem?”

  “I-i-it’s just, aren’t the ones in the middle, like, level three or four and kind of strong?”

  Curren shrugged and replied evenly, “There’s no advantage in choosing an opponent on the same level now. You’re level two and I’m level one, so for a tag-team match, we should choose opponents with a total level of six, minimum. If we do that, even if we do end up losing, your points won’t end up at zero.”

  “Th-that does make sense, I guess,” Haruyuki murmured, stunned, as he remembered what Takumu had said: the amazingly capable bouncer Aqua Current. Also known as the One. The reason for that was because she was at level one, even though she was quite the veteran.

  But when he thought about it, was that actually possible? Like she was actually strong enough to protect any client who came along, even though she was only at level one? So why one, then? When you went up levels, your HP also increased, and you could pick whatever bonuses you wanted, like special attacks and abilities, weapons, and ability enhancements. As long as you were careful to leave enough points in your balance, there should have been no disadvantage to going up levels.

  Here, Haruyuki finally realized something, and he opened both eyes wide with a gasp. “So, um, is the reason why you’re at level one to lower the total level for tag-teaming, Curren? When you team up with someone for a tag match, the higher your level is, the fewer points you can get when you win, and the more points you lose when you’re defeated. To avoid that—in other words, for total newbies you don’t even know on the verge of losing everything, you just stay at level one?” Haruyuki asked, in a hoarse voice.

  “That’s half the reason.” The expression on the face of the bespectacled otter did not change in the slightest as she brought her shoulders up and down. “Someday, the time will come to tell you the other half. Perhaps. Or maybe it won’t. At the very least, if you lose all your points today, it will never come.”

  “I—I guess so.” As his nose twitched at the nervous tension that welled up within him again, Curren reached out to the list again.

  “At the present moment, our names are already registered on the matching list. It’s a matter of milliseconds, but even so, someone could have accelerated at the same time and will come along to challenge us. In that case, you will have just wasted a precious point.”

  “Oh. R-right. That’s true.”

  “This tag match is level three and four, but I know them both quite well. They’re not the red, long-range sniper types you’re bad with. And they have a fair bit of leeway with points, so they should come out to fight head-on. If you can just relax and actually use the power you’ve got, we definitely won’t lose…probably.”

  This person really does know me. And on top of that, she’s trying to help me for real. Why is she level one? Why does she want your real identity as payment? And to begin with, what motivates her to even do this bouncer thing? I don’t know anything about her, but I have to trust her now. I’ll trust her and fight as hard as I can.

  He’d do it so that he wouldn’t have any regrets even if they lost, even if he lost Brain Burst. At the eleventh hour, Haruyuki finally felt a readiness, albeit meager and tightly condensed, being born within him.

  He took a deep breath, clenched both hoofs of his avatar, and nodded. “I’ll fight hard.”

  “Just do it as you would normally. This is a fight you can’t afford to lose, but more important than winning is—”

  “Having fun,” Haruyuki interrupted, and Curren’s eyes widened just a little behind her glasses. Rubbing his nose as if to hide his embarrassment, he added, “My ‘parent’ taught me that. She says to have fun in all your duels.”

  “Yes. That’s right.” Nodding slowly, for a brief instant, Aqua Current got a strange look on her face—maybe it was his imagination, but she looked somehow nostalgic for the past—before she touched the matching list.

  “We’re starting,” she said briefly, and pressed the DUEL START button.

  The two animal avatars and the frozen blue world melted into the light and disappeared. Haruyuki’s consciousness was whisked off to some unknown duel stage.

  5

  Aqua: water.

  Current: flow.

  The name given to a Burst Linker often expressed the special characteristics of an avatar’s appearance, but Haruyuki couldn’t help thinking examples this straightforward were rare.

  He had no sooner descended to stand on the stage as the silver-winged avatar Silver Crow when his eyes caught next to him a slender figure, unremarkable in terms of silhouette. Maybe a little taller than Crow. Sleek arms and legs, nothing resembling a weapon on the torso. Or perhaps, it could be said that the entire body featured special equipment.

  From the top of her head to the tips of her toes, Aqua Current was completely wrapped in a layer of fast-flowing water. The liquid that soundlessly flowed from shoulder to hand, from chest to hips to feet, became thin cables of water at her digits and then rose up, carving out large arcs to the rear to envelop the avatar from the back of the head once more. Simply put, Curren’s armor was water itself, flowing in an eternal loop.

  Although the water was probably only two or three centimeters deep, no matter how he strained his eyes, he couldn’t manage to see through to the avatar body beneath it. In the greenish ambient light of the Corrosive Forest stage, the water glittered a faint green. It really was just as Takumu said: Aqua Current was the color of water, but no single color. And from the physique, it was hard to tell whether the avatar was a male or female type.

  Haruyuki observed this much in the two seconds or so before Curren said in a low voice, “Approximately two minutes until contact. The enemy tag team is coming south from Ochanomizu Station on Meidai Street.” Her voice also didn’t offer any hint about gender due to the strong filter effect. Plus, the slightly stilted way of speaking of the real-world Aqua Current had disappeared. If he hadn’t slammed right into her in front of the washrooms in an accidental rea
l attack, he wouldn’t have had a single reason to suspect that Curren was a girl.

  Haruyuki nodded. “O-okay. They’re coming straight at us, aren’t they?” As he switched mental gears, he stared at the light blue triangle in the center of his field of view, the guide cursor.

  At that moment, they were standing above an enormous tree that was once the large bookstore on the southwest corner of the Suruga Daishita intersection in Jimbocho. He called it a tree, but unlike the powerful broad-leafed trees of the Primeval Forest stage, it was an ill-formed silhouette, thin branches stretching out apologetically from a half-rotted trunk.

  The intersection far below was large—the place where the east-west Yasukuni Street crossed the north-south Meidai Street—but the ground was 80 percent covered by an odious, viscous purple fluid that burped up bubbles from time to time. A poison bog. The Corrosive Forest stage had the very irritating feature of eating up your health gauge if you so much as set foot in one of its poisonous bog zones.

  Since it was a tag-team fight, there were two guide cursors, but they were basically on top of each other as they pointed north. Their opponents were probably coming south in a straight line down the gentle slope of Meidai Street from Ochanomizu. A sickly baobab-like tree was in the way, so he couldn’t see them, but the singular direction of the team seemed to indicate that they were coming in a dash, roughly avoiding the poison bogs but not worrying too much about it. One of the two opposing team health gauges in the upper right of his view was dropping slightly, in tiny increments.

  “I-it really is like a head-on fight, huh?” he murmured, and finally checked his opponents’ names. The level four was Nickel Doll; the level three was Sand Duct. He had never seen either of them before.