Exactly how many hours—how many days—had passed? Zelkova Verger, a Burst Linker from the small Legion Gallant Hawks, stood rooted to the spot in a half-lit, colorless world.
His avatar was uncomfortably transparent, and the outlines of the rocky mountains that rose up all around him were also nothing more than a smoky haze. The only thing clearly visible to him was the cluster of six small digital numerals decreasing soundlessly in the middle of his field of view. This timer was counting down the sixty minutes to his regeneration. When it reached zero, he would be revived and take on solid form once again in the Unlimited Neutral Field.
He’d died accidentally a couple times before on Enemy hunts with Legion members, and he’d then cursed the absurdly long wait to be brought back to life. Now, however, his heart was filled with the exact opposite feeling—the desire for his regeneration to come even a minute, even a second later, the wish for time to simply stop.
Because Zelkova Verger was currently trapped in a situation every Burst Linker lived in true fear of, the ultimate peril—Unlimited Enemy Kill. And it was no run-of-the-mill Enemy killing him repeatedly and instantaneously every time he returned from the dead. This Enemy was more powerful than even the Four Gods, the Super-class Enemies that guarded the four Castle gates. This was the most powerful and most destructive creature in the history of the Accelerated World, the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca.
Actually…maybe this is it. Maybe I can’t escape death—total point loss.
Zelkova closed his eyes and clenched his teeth in bitter resignation.
I probably underestimated this game Brain Burst. I happened to get a duel avatar with a good balance between offense and defense, I got lucky with good comrades and a good game space. So I made it to level six without any real crises, no real tight spots to speak of. Although it did take a while to get here. But I sort of assumed I’d keep going up and up. The Accelerated World’s not so cushy as that, though.
I mean, I went all the way to Suginami ’cause I wanted to show off to my “parent,” Taupe Cape, to look cool. The most unserious of motivations, for real. When I got my butt handed to me by Silver Crow, I should’ve realized I was full of myself; it was all my own stupid pride.
But I didn’t. I talked Taupe and the rest of the Legion into joining the massive joint army Exercitus and challenging Tezcatlipoca. Sure, I wanted to believe in the manifesto in the invitation mail, all the excitement and hype. But I could’ve realized what they were talking about was seriously dangerous and not gone any further. The way Itabashi’s midsize Legion Helix did.
So if I lose all my points here, it’s my own stupid fault. But…
Zelkova looked around slowly as he reproached himself for his own role in this tragedy.
About a hundred meters away, a terrifyingly enormous human-shaped silhouette soared up into the sky. He could only see it as a black shadow, since he was a ghost at the moment, but he knew that it was the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, itself, motionless because it had slaughtered all of the Burst Linkers within its aggro range. But when even a single person within that range regenerated, it would instantly leap into motion once more.
At the foot of the gigantic shadow, he could see the flickering of countless three-dimensional icons patterned after small flames. All were the death markers of Burst Linkers who had joined in the mission to subjugate Tezcatlipoca. The truly fearsome thing was that a quarter or so of the more than three hundred markers that had been there in the immediate aftermath of the annihilation of the subjugation team had already disappeared. In other words, seventy or eighty Burst Linkers had lost all of their points and been permanently banished from the Accelerated World during the week—around 170 hours—since the team had fallen into the Unlimited EK state.
This, too, however, was perhaps only to be expected. The number of points a Burst Linker lost when killed by an Enemy in the Unlimited Neutral Field was fixed at ten, so the number of points lost in an Unlimited EK of 170 hours was basically 1,700. If a player had only just leveled up or made a large purchase at the shop, they could easily have had not even a thousand points remaining in their account.
Fortunately—well, he wasn’t sure about that part, but anyway—Zelkova Verger had been squirreling his points away for months, gunning for level seven, so he had a stock of around 2,100. Even after a week of Unlimited EK chipping away at that stock, he still had a surplus of 400-ish. Which meant that if he kept regenerating and dying like this, he would face a total point loss in forty hours.
He regretted setting his automatic disconnect safety, a must when diving into the Unlimited Neutral Field, to sixty minutes of real-world time. He could make excuses and say he’d had to because that was what was in the Exercitus mission plan, and that would have been true. But if he’d ignored that instruction and set his safety to ten minutes—no, one minute—he would have burst out long ago.
But there was no sense in regret or what-ifs at this point. The fact was that in forty hours, Zelkova would no longer be a Burst Linker. He had more or less made his peace with that, although the feeling was a somewhat desperate one. But there was just one thing that he couldn’t accept.
The small, colorless flame that flickered a mere three meters from his own death marker. If he hadn’t been dead, it would have appeared to be a warm gray with a hint of purple to it, the death marker of his parent and the leader of the Gallant Hawks, Taupe Cape.
A grade below him at junior high school in the real world, she was more the cautious type, and she hadn’t been particularly interested in taking part in this joint subjugation mission. Zelkova and fellow Legion member Dim, aka Rubidium Cooler, had talked her into it, and the entire Legion had joined Exercitus. So it wasn’t Taupe’s fault that they were in this situation. Most likely, Dim and their other comrades had lost all their points long ago, and Zelkova himself only had forty hours left to live. At the very least, however, he wanted to make sure Taupe survived. Given her personality, it might have been too much for her to revive the Legion on her own, but even still, he wanted her to continue living as a Burst Linker.
While he earnestly tried to maintain his thought clock speed, despite the fear, despair, and lack of sleep that pushed it ever downward, Zelkova Verger prayed with all his heart.
Please… Someone, rescue Taupe from this certain death. I don’t care what happens to me. Take Taupe’s marker and get it out of Tezcatlipoca’s range…
But, of course, there was no one to hear this prayer.
The countdown in the center of his field of view continued its relentless march toward zero. Only five minutes and thirty seconds left until his nth regeneration.
Abruptly, the inky black giant stirred soundlessly, a hundred meters before him.
While the two hundred and some dozen ghostly Burst Linkers bound to this spot had initially died at basically the same time, over the course of being repeatedly resurrected and killed, the timing of their individual regenerations had grown more and more out of sync, so that now there was a gap of about five minutes among them. The earliest group had started to return from the dead, prompting Tezcatlipoca to move once more.