Haruyuki couldn’t help but feel a fire spring up inside him at the condescension in the other fighter’s voice. He was sorely tempted to ask what would happen if he won, but he bit his tongue to keep the question inside his mouth. The conditions Urocyon was offering were the best he was going to get in the current situation. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if his obstinacy caused Urocyon to change his mind and make the fight until death.
He took a deep breath and nodded. “…Fine.”
Urocyon grinned a second time before lobbing an unexpected question his way. “You got any cool nicknames?”
“…”
The breath he had started to take caught in the back of his throat, and he very nearly choked.
Even Silver Crow, still far from a high ranker, had what could be called nicknames. The one that likely rang truest for the members of Exercitus was “Betrayer,” but to give that name now would make it sound a little too much like he was trying to play the villain. And Urocyon would have no clue as to the meaning of the title of “Antidote King,” bestowed on him by the Red Legion’s Iodine Sterilizer, so he overcame his embarrassment to give the Drive Linker a nickname that was appropriately nickname-ish.
“…Speed Star.”
“Oh-ho!” Urocyon said, without any hint of poking fun, and waved his hand to the side. “Woh-kay! All you out there! The champion for BB2039, ‘Speed Star’ Silver Crow and the champion for DD2047, me—‘Primal Fang’ Urocyon—are going head-to-head! Don’t go tagging yourself in or anything stupid!”
Instantly, a quiet stir ran through the survivors watching from a distance.
The members of Exercitus no doubt had a hard time accepting Haruyuki, a member of Oscillatory Universe, as their champion. But even if any of them could use Incarnate, Haruyuki found it hard to believe that they could have mustered up any real imagination at the moment, worn down as they were from weeks of Unlimited EK.
Several of the survivors apparently reached the same conclusion and called out to their neighboring comrades to fall back. Now that he was thinking about it, they could have escaped through the portal in Sunshine City now that Tezcatlipoca was no longer binding them to the spot. But perhaps they’d refused to abandon their comrades still on regeneration standby; he didn’t see anyone attempt to flee to the real world.
Once the survivors were all outside of the intersection, Urocyon clapped his hands together loudly. “Yeaaah. Looks like we finally got a real challenger.”
“Is Dread Drive 2047 a one-on-one fighting game like Brain Burst?” Haruyuki asked reflexively, in response. The reason he was curious was that the already shuttered Trial No. 1, aka Accel Assault 2038, had been a high-speed, 3D shooting game, and No. 3, aka Cosmos Corrupt 2040, had been a hack-and-slash, both totally different genres from BB2039.
“A fighter?” Urocyon blinked eyes that emitted a pale-blue light before turning his palms up in front of him. “It’s maybe got fighter-y bits, but DD’s something else. It’s like… I dunno, hard to nutshell it. If I had to say, it’s a MOBA with dashes of 3D shooter, fighter, and hack-and-slash, maybe?”
“…!”
MOBA stood for “multi-player online battle arena,” a game genre mixing action RPG with real-time strategy that had spread and garnered popularity starting around the 2010s. And what the Drive Linker was saying was that despite the fact that MOBA itself was cross-genre, elements of shooters, fighters, and hack-and-slash had been further added.
Haruyuki could not picture at all the kind of game that would have resulted from this mishmash. But what bothered him about that description was that the three additional elements Urocyon named were the genres of AA, BB, and CC, respectively. Almost like he was saying Dread Drive 2047 was the actual, complete game, founded upon the three trials…
“But no need to get all up in the deets if we’re just going one-on-one. We start throwing punches, and the one left standing—no, if you’re still alive in five minutes, you win.” Urocyon shrugged casually, perhaps misunderstanding Haruyuki’s silence.
While he hadn’t been worried about the rules of the other game, it was true that this was the only thing that mattered at the moment. “Got it,” he replied briefly, and raised both of his arms, stepped forward with his left foot, and pulled his right back.
Like his mirror image, Urocyon put his right foot forward and readied himself. In boxing, this was a southpaw stance, but it would have been premature to decide from this alone that the Drive Linker was left-handed.
Either way, defense was his top priority. But even if Urocyon’s attack was mere punches and kicks, he wouldn’t be able to defend against them without using Incarnate. Which meant that for the next five minutes, he would have to continuously maintain his Laser Sword image.
I can do this.
When he copied Haruyuki’s Range Expansion Incarnate technique Laser Lance, “Basher” Platinum Cavalier, first of Oscillatory Universe’s Seven Dwarves, had calmly told him that he could maintain a copy of “simple techniques” like Haruyuki’s own light beam series for days.
Yes. Even for a first-stage Incarnate technique, Laser Sword was one of the simplest possible. This simplicity, making it so that Cavalier could easily reproduce the technique, could be an advantage now.
When Haruyuki cloaked his hands in silver overlay with no advance movement, Urocyon also brought up blue phosphorescence, as if he’d been waiting for him to be ready. Haruyuki’s light was brighter, but that merely meant his was less optimized.
How long exactly had it taken Urocyon to get this kind of fine control over his imagination? Haruyuki nearly cried in admiration. But the battle was starting.
Bwwn! The air shook, and Urocyon instantly closed the distance between them. With speed such that his entire avatar was nothing more than flowing blue lines, he shot out with two rights in a row, super-high-speed jabs that would beat Great Wall’s boxing Linker, Iron Pound, at his own game.
But after surviving Platinum Cavalier’s divinely fast Femto-style slicing attack, Haruyuki was just barely able to react in time. He guarded against the rapid-fire punches coming in at slightly different angles with the armor on the back of his left hand and arm. Blue and silver sparks scattered, and the impact shook him to the core of his avatar body. Both fighters were knocked back over a meter from the repulsive force of their Incarnates making contact.
Haruyuki’s Laser Sword was not an armor strength expansion Incarnate technique, but Urocyon’s right jab wasn’t actually an Incarnate technique, just a normal technique enhanced with Incarnate power. Thanks to that, he was able to defend against the attack somehow, but if his opponent were to use Incarnate for real, he probably wouldn’t be able to completely protect himself from it with his overlay alone.
Which was why he couldn’t focus solely on defense if he was going to survive these five minutes. While Urocyon was taking these preliminary test shots, he had to make him eat an Incarnate technique with more power than his opponent imagined he had. Even if a fatal blow was out of the question, he had to at least destroy an arm or a leg…
His mind racing, Haruyuki tightened his guard in preparation for the next attack.
“Cerdocyon!” Urocyon shouted as he launched a right hook to the body.
It’s too fast. After this thought flashed through his mind, he felt a shiver of fear cold enough to freeze his spine.
Point zero one of a second later, this fear became reality.
The aura in Urocyon’s left hand transformed into the head of a transparent blue animal and flew ferociously toward him. Bearing a strong resemblance to his mask, the animal head opened wide a maw filled with sharp fangs and tried to bite into Haruyuki’s side.
Instantly judging that defense was impossible, Haruyuki leapt back and desperately twisted his body to the side.
Krnch! A disgusting sensation raced through his entire body, followed by an incandescent pain. The blue animal head slipped to his rear, droplets of red light dripping from its closed mouth, and disappeared.
“Hngh!” Groaning, Haruyuki put even more space between himself and Urocyon. When he glanced down, he found a large hole in the armor on his right side, and a deep bite taken out of his naked avatar body. His armor cross section was smooth, like it had been polished, and he was 90 percent certain that the fox head had been no ordinary special attack.
“…Was that ‘Psion,’ too?” he asked, to confirm his suspicion, and a bold smile rode up on Urocyon’s face.
“Yep. And I’ll tell you just this once, as a special treat. Cerdocyon’s a crab-eating fox in South America.” He pulled his left hand back and readied himself in the southpaw stance once more. “You got any Psion Arts, you can go ahead and use ’em. This isn’t the kinda sitch where you gotta save your special treats for later, yeah?”
“…”
Haruyuki nodded wordlessly and also readied himself. He had learned two things from this round. One was that even Urocyon, who seemed to have perfect control of Psion—Incarnate power—also needed to shout the technique name when activating it. And the other was that the Drive Linker didn’t show any fear of the dark side of Incarnate.
He was curious if this was because Urocyon simply didn’t care or because he had overcome that dark side, but any further questions would seem like he was trying to kill time. He checked and saw that he had 90 percent of his health gauge left still and played one of his trump cards—he vibrated the wings on his back at full power.