Haruyuki Arita heard every word of this loud declaration, but he needed a few seconds to understand its meaning.
Trial No. 2 was the Accelerated World, formally known as Brain Burst 2039, the battleground and lived-in space for Haruyuki and the other Burst Linkers. Just as the name indicated, Brain Burst began service in 2039 and had continued over eight years into the present. And this guy was saying that today was the end…?
Slightly dizzy, Haruyuki blinked his eyes repeatedly beneath Silver Crow’s mirrored goggles.
To his right and left, the reddish-brown large rocks particular to the Wasteland stage covered the ground, almost endless in number. The model for this stage was apparently a picturesque area in the United States’ Colorado Plateau known as Monument Valley, but he very much did not have the brain space to take in the scenery at the moment.
Haruyuki and Chiyuri Kurashima, who had dived with him, were standing shoulder to shoulder on the roof of the mixed-use skyscraper Toshima Ecomuse Town, which housed the Toshima Ward office in the real world. To the north side of the building they looked down from was the large intersection where Green Street and Arterial Road No. 81 met, and a strangely shaped statue rose right in the middle of it.
Two cylindrical pillars stretched up vertically and fused together about forty meters off the ground to become one thick pillar. Another twenty meters up, this pillar was severed horizontally, leaving the cross section exposed. The stone statue looked almost as though everything above the waist of an enormous sculpture of a human figure had been destroyed.
Actually, it didn’t merely look like that. This was exactly what it was. The statue was the remains of the Super-class Enemy, the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, which destroyed itself after plunging the Accelerated World into total chaos.
But this was absolutely not the end of that chaos.
From inside the crumbling Tezcatlipoca, a swirling red elliptical light—a portal—had appeared, and through it, ten unknown Burst Linkers had stepped into the Unlimited Neutral Field. The one who had declared that “service ends today” was on the far right. A small male-type wearing a blue mask and suit with a design reminiscent of a canine creature.
“…Dread Drive 2047…” Haruyuki murmured, almost silently, and then it hit him.
If Brain Burst 2039 was the name of a different world and a different game, then these ten people were not Burst Linkers. They should be called “Drive Linkers,” and they were, in the truest sense of the word, visitors—no, invaders.
“Give final notice…?” Chiyuri muttered next to him, her voice hoarse. “They think they can do anything, just the ten of them?”
Below the Drive Linkers lined up along one edge of the stone statue, the area was dotted with fiftyish Burst Linkers and about the same number of death markers. The members of Exercitus, the joint army launched through a merger of a number of small and midsize Legions in order to subjugate Tezcatlipoca. There had likely been more than three hundred of them at the start of the subjugation mission, but they had been trampled down by Tezcatlipoca before Haruyuki and Chiyuri arrived, and two-thirds—more than two hundred army members—had been pushed to a total point loss.
In terms of the number of people sacrificed at one time, this was without a doubt the largest tragedy in the history of the Accelerated World. The majority of responsibility lay with Haruyuki, who had destroyed the “egg” that was the Sun God Inti, awakening Tezcatlipoca. He felt his heart being crushed in his chest at the mere thought of it, but giving in to despair now would solve nothing.
The issue was, just as Chiyuri said, what these ten people were planning to do.
He very much doubted that the words “end of service” were to be taken literally. Because while this was an unprecedented situation, what with the portal to another world/game and with the red hexagons embedded in the sky of the stage, the fact was that Haruyuki and the others were still there, inside Brain Burst 2039.
Nevertheless, a part of him did think that this was maybe the beginning of the end. Snow Fairy, aka Sleepy, the second of Oscillatory Universe’s Seven Dwarves, had once told him on the Highest Level.
The end can no longer be avoided. The question is only how we Burst Linkers will end. Will we finish our time in pain, humiliation, and despair like the Assault Linkers and the Corrupt Linkers? Or…?
What if the end that Fairy was referring to was this very situation? Was today—July 27, 2047—really the day that Brain Burst service ended after eight years? Had the ten Drive Linkers’ messengers come to spread this message far and wide?
Haruyuki somehow managed to process this much in his half-paralyzed brain, when the blue-masked Drive Linker shouted down once again from the edge of the stone statue.
“If you’re not gonna get out, then we’re assuming you’re ready to tango with us! I mean, a Linker’s always up for a little dancing, am I right?!”
He pointed at the survivors on the ground with his right hand.
“I’m gonna eat up every last bit of that pride of yours! Say hello to the captain of DD2047’s Unifiers’ shock corps…Urocyon!”
“We’re not a shock corps. There’s only ten of us,” the witch in the wide-brimmed hat sitting in the air behind him retorted coolly.
“Shut up!” Blue Mask barked, kicking at the edge of the statue to drop down through the air.
While the top half had been destroyed, Tezcatlipoca had been a powerful presence on the landscape, standing shoulder to shoulder with the skyscrapers around it, and the top of its remains still stood sixty meters above the ground. Even a high ranker couldn’t survive a drop from this height without cushioning the impact somehow.
But the blue-masked Drive Linker Urocyon did not run vertically down the wall like Blood Leopard did with her Constant Full Run ability, nor did he descend slowly as Centaurea Sentry’s Feather Fall ability allowed her to do, nor did he spread his wings like Silver Crow’s Flight. He simply plunged toward the ground in a straight line, yanked down by gravity. Ka-wham! He slammed into the hard earth.
The shock wave reached even the roof of Ecomuse Town a hundred meters off horizontally and two hundred meters away perpendicularly, albeit faintly, and Haruyuki instinctively assumed that Blue Mask was dead.
But a heartbeat later, a blue shadow shot out of the cloud of dirt and dust puffing up into the air, whirled around as though inertia had no grip on him, and closed in on the nearest Exercitus survivors.
“Huh?” Chiyuri gasped. “He’s not even hurt?!”
Haruyuki was equally surprised. He couldn’t see the Drive Linker’s health gauge, but he couldn’t pick up on any kind of injury from the impossibly nimble movements of the invader.
The survivor he’d set his sights on, a green-type midsize avatar, abruptly threw his arms up, as if yanked out of a dream, brought his hands neatly together in front of his body, and took on a completely defensive posture. The thick armor of his forearms fused to produce a pentagonal shield.
Even if this green-type was level four and had only just gained entry to the Unlimited Neutral Field, breaking that shield with simply a physical attack would have been difficult. If Haruyuki watched the Drive Linker’s reaction, he should be able to get some small sense of the abilities and power of Blue Mask and thus of the other Drive Linkers.
He felt bad for using as guinea pigs the Burst Linkers who had managed to somehow survive Tezcatlipoca’s savage attack, but there were currently more than fifty Exercitus survivors, and basically the same number of dead about to regenerate. Even if, in the worst case, Blue Mask had the power of a King, he wouldn’t be able to take all of those Burst Linkers out in a single blow.
My focus here has to be on careful observation of the situation, so I can report back in accurate detail to Kuroyukihime and my comrades in Nega Nebulus, Haruyuki told himself, and then remembered that he was no longer a member of Nega Nebulus. His virtual heart throbbed painfully, but he ignored it and widened his eyes intently.
Blue Mask, aka Urocyon, closed in on the green-type avatar from head-on, whirled around in midair, and launched a backward roundhouse kick with all his force riding on it. The movement was almost frighteningly smooth, master-level, but it was nonetheless a simple blow with no extra bells or whistles.
Haruyuki could practically see the kick repelled by the thick shield and Urocyon flipping back in midair before being knocked flying by a counterattack.
However.
The very instant Urocyon’s foot touched the green shield, there was a flash of blue, and the five-centimeter-thick shield shattered like it was made of candy. And the roundhouse kick didn’t stop there—it pulverized both of the green-type’s sturdy arms and dug deeply into the chest armor beyond them.
Kakrrrrnk! Even Haruyuki, far up in the sky above, heard the sickening crunch as the green avatar’s torso broke into countless fragments.
“…No way…,” Chiyuri murmured, stunned.
Urocyon was already leaping over the death marker that had appeared at his feet and running toward a new target, a red-type avatar with large guns equipped in his swollen arms.
This avatar chose to attack rather than to defend. He turned the palms of his hands toward Urocyon to send jets of bright-red flames from the barrels that were three centimeters across.
He fired repeatedly over the span of two seconds, with the flaming bullets shooting out at seemingly impossible speed. Urocyon ran in a zigzag pattern to dodge the first four shots, but the fifth hit him squarely in his left femur.
The skintight blue suit was quite thin and very much did not look equipped with enough defensive power to withstand a thirty-millimeter shell. Haruyuki wouldn’t have been surprised if the Drive Linker’s entire leg had been blown away. And yet the fat bullet merely generated blue sparks and a dull metallic clunk before rebounding back and disappearing somewhere behind Blue Mask.