And then a gravitational force yanked mercilessly on his entire body, so powerfully he was surprised it didn’t lift the surface of the ground itself. But rather than resisting this force, he looked back, threw his right hand out determinedly, pressed it to the ground, and shouted, “Monolithic Wall!”
His special attack gauge had been fully charged by the destruction of the Eboniluce, and now it dropped 70 percent as a reddish-brown slab shot straight up from the bedrock before his eyes. This was his level-five special attack, a monolith of a wall reaching a thickness of ten centimeters and a height and breadth of two meters. With no offensive power, the technique was for defense only, and it was highly resistant to every attack type except fire. Its unique feature was that it absolutely would not move from the spot in which it was generated unless the supporting surface itself was destroyed.
Zelkova poked his face out from behind the wall he’d produced, and the shock that hit him was so powerful, he worried it would shatter his face mask. His health gauge dropped nearly 30 percent, but his descent into the black hole was just barely stopped.
Taupe Cape slammed into his back. Her body flipped over, unable to withstand the intense gravity, and just as she was on the verge of rolling out from behind the wall, he grabbed on to her arm and yanked her back. Dust and sand and rocks flowed past like a river to either side of them.
“Thanks! Don’t let go!” Taupe Cape cried, her voice pained.
As instructed, he wrapped his arms around the small avatar from behind and held on tightly. He’d never been this close to Taupe Cape in the Accelerated World before, much less in the real world.
Thinking about it, he didn’t even know the reason why Taupe decided to make him her “child.” Their only point of contact was the handicraft club they belonged to at school. But the girl members mostly sewed and knit, while the boy members focused on woodworking, so they basically never talked to each other. The only thing resembling a conversation they’d had before he became a Burst Linker was when he helped her look for the embroidery needle she’d dropped.
Alone with a younger girl after school in the craft studio, Zelkova hadn’t known what to do with himself, so he’d gone on and on about his congenital night blindness and how he’d enhanced his ability to see in the dark since he was a baby with a Neurolinker and special contact lenses. Taupe must’ve chosen him as her child because she’d learned by chance that day that he met the first condition to become a Burst Linker—continually wearing a Neurolinker since immediately after birth.
He wanted to talk with her more. He wanted to tell her about himself, about his own guess as to why he’d ended up with a tree guardian, Zelkova Verger, as his duel avatar. And he wanted her to tell him about herself, about her convictions as a Burst Linker, her objectives as Legion Master. It had been a year and a half since they became parent and child, and yet this was the first time he had seriously felt this.
His instantaneous thoughts couldn’t have been transmitted through their armor, but Taupe made a movement like the smallest of nods and cried out in a hoarse voice.
“Mole Hole!”
This technique name was unfamiliar to Zelkova. He watched as semitransparent, four-footed creatures glowing with a purple light leapt forward from her hands and began to dig furiously at the surface of the ground in front of them. For a second, he thought they were enormous mice, but judging from their stout bodies and their shovel-like front paws, they were probably moles. After all, that’s what “mole” meant in English, and Taupe had told him before that her color name meant the shade of a mole’s fur in French.
The semitransparent moles dug up the supposedly indestructible earth with surprising force and disappeared into an opening the size of a manhole.
Abruptly, he heard a dull thrrk and a hard crack at the same time. The thrrk was the sound of the Monolithic Wall supporting them breaking and bending in the middle. And the crack was the sound of his armor fracturing, unable to withstand the pressure.
“Zel, once your armor breaks off, jump into the hole!” Taupe cried, and his eyes flew open in surprise.
The hole was about sixty centimeters across. Heavyweight Zelkova had a shoulder span of nearly eighty centimeters, so he would absolutely get stuck if he tried to jump into it in other circumstances. But with the armor around his shoulders and hips shattered in the gravity of the micro black hole, and with his avatar body exposed, he should have been just barely able to pass through the opening.
How long, exactly, had Taupe been cooking up this strategy?
She’d waited intently until the weakest class of Enemy popped up nearby, defeated it to charge up their special attack gauges, opened a hole in the ground with Mole Hole, used Tezcatlipoca’s Toxcatl to smash his armor, and finally had him leap into the hole. Each of these steps was far more difficult to carry out than finding an embroidery needle in a dark craft studio, and yet Taupe had managed to successfully execute four of the five.
But one serious issue remained.
“Taupe, can the two of us fit in here?!” he cried.
“It’ll be fine! You first, Zel!” Taupe responded without a moment’s hesitation. Almost like she had expected him to ask the question.
He heard an even louder crack as the armor on his back and left arm shattered. The gravity of the black hole grew endlessly stronger and tried to plunge the two of them into an inky darkness. Monolithic Wall had only barely stopped that process, but it continued to bend under the pressure and would likely break apart entirely in the next ten seconds.
Zelkova wasted a too-precious second in thought and made up his mind.
Without a word, he grabbed Taupe’s waist and lifted her off the ground.
“Z-Zel?!” she yelped.
He ignored her and took a step forward, fighting the overwhelming gravity. Cracks raced across his armor, and pieces peeled away. The damage reached his naked avatar body, and his health gauge started to drop rapidly, but he ignored this and put all of his strength into moving his right leg.
“Unh. Ah. Aaaaaaaaah!” Letting loose with a scream unlike any sound he’d ever made in any duel, he took another step forward and lifted Taupe up high.
“No!! Zel, you can’t!” she half screamed, struggling to free herself.
Although he wanted to thank her for everything, he didn’t even have the extra strength left needed to move his mouth. Holding his breath and gritting his teeth, he threw her into the Mole Hole. He caught a rock tumbling along like a beach ball, in thrall to the gravitational pull, and mustered up the very last of his power to shove it into the hole and make a cover.
He didn’t know whether or not this would save Taupe Cape. The Change came over the Unlimited Neutral Field once every week or so, and all damage to the world was reset when the stage attributes changed. While there was a real possibility that the Mole Hole would disappear and Taupe would be spat out, if the hole could make it through the Change…
As Zelkova used up the last drop of his mental focus, his feet peeled away from the ground. At basically the same time, Monolithic Wall shattered into pieces and transformed into countless atoms.
Wrapped in ephemeral, shining particles, Zelkova Verger fell into the roaring vortex of the black hole.