Urocyon still had both arms thrown up into the air, and Haruyuki slid his blade toward the Drive Linker’s defenseless right flank. Focusing the small amount of mental stamina he’d recovered during their conversation, he prepared to use Gou the instant the tip touched the aura armor.
But before he could, he was hit with an impact like the air itself had exploded, and the figure of Urocyon was erased.
No, it hadn’t been erased. Haruyuki just barely caught sight of a blue afterimage in one edge of his field of view. Directly above him.
Yanking his sword back with everything he had, he threw his head back.
A dark, black figure floated in a sky tiled with crimson hexagons. For an instant, Haruyuki thought it was a flight ability, but that wasn’t it. Urocyon had jumped from a standing position to an incredible altitude, probably more than twenty meters.
Arms and legs splayed, the silhouette that dropped toward him now was clearly a different shape from only a few seconds ago. The arms had already been a little long for the body, but now they were even longer and more muscular. The waist was constricted almost abnormally, while the thighs of both legs were swollen, albeit with the legs lean and compact from the knees down. And a tail stretched out from the backside, looking like blue flames.
Lycanth.
The word flashed through Haruyuki’s mind at the same time as Urocyon curled into himself, instantly increasing the speed of his descent.
Haruyuki did a backflip to try and dodge the blue-black mass of the werewolf hurtling toward him. But while he was still in the air, Urocyon threw his legs out and kicked at the air.
It was unbelievable, but unmistakable. Haruyuki saw a ring-shaped flash of light kick back from the empty space, and the angle of Urocyon’s descent shifted sharply. Onto a collision course with Haruyuki.
He could use his wings to increase the skip distance, but Urocyon would no doubt kick at the air again to precisely target his new position. In which case…
Haruyuki fully deployed the ten metal fins on his back, spread out the still-equipped Enhanced Armament Metatron Wings, and vibrated them all at full power. The enormous thrust powerfully accelerated his avatar not to the side, but up—straight for the descending Urocyon.
He didn’t know whether the Drive Linker expected something like this or was caught off guard. But either way, Urocyon spread his contracted limbs and used the air resistance to decelerate as he concentrated the burning blue aura in his arms.
His intact left hand grew to nearly twice its original size, claws like lethal weapons stretching out from his fingertips, sharp tips glinting. Including the aura enveloping them, the claws looked to have a reach close to thirty centimeters. A single swipe would no doubt tear off a limb or remove his head. And the right hand that Haruyuki had severed was reproduced with an aura of the same size.
If Urocyon swung arms that massive in midair, his body should spin in the opposite direction in reaction. But Haruyuki immediately discarded this idea.
Just as he’d expected, Urocyon stepped on empty space, upside-down, and using this nothing as a foothold, he swung both arms simultaneously.
Glaring at the ten claws carving out a blue V in the air as they shot toward him, Haruyuki shouted, Light Speed!!
Once more, he didn’t know if the technique name had actually come from his mouth or if it had only echoed in his mind. But the silver wings on his back responded to his will and generated a thrust so powerful that the metal armor of his own body creaked.
The distance between the two fighters rapidly approached zero. Claws shrouded in blue flames closed in on his helmet.
If he let fear in for even the merest fraction of a second, his acceleration would slow, and those claws would make mincemeat of his head. He beat back reason and common sense with the fire burning in his heart, and he pushed himself to go even faster.
Zzt! He heard a scraping sound like an arc discharge, and the claws grazed the sides of his helmet and slipped off to the rear.
Urocyon’s head was right before his eyes. Mere seconds earlier, it had been a human face wearing a fox mask, but now it was completely animal.
“Graaaaar!” the Drive Linker roared ferociously, his sharp teeth bared.
“Aaaaaah!” Haruyuki also let out a cry from the depths of his stomach and slammed his head with everything he had into the werewolf’s snout.
He didn’t have the time to activate his special attack Head Butt, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have worked against Urocyon’s Incarnate technique level defenses. His sole hope was that the image of the second-stage Incarnate technique Light Speed would overwrite those defenses.
His face gets crushed or my head goes flying! One or the other!
A dizzying impact and flash of light. Even his own health gauge disappeared in the pure white halation of his field of view.
Haruyuki braced himself for the death message YOU ARE DEAD to pop up there.
But a second later, the world took on color again, and his health gauge was displayed once more. The quantum circuits for his brain in the Main Visualizer—the Brain Burst central server—had apparently malfunctioned due to the powerful impact, albeit only for a moment.
His health gauge had dropped more than 70 percent, but he was still alive.
In the center of his recovered field of view, he saw the werewolf reeling, head back and growing distant. Haruyuki was also falling, similarly reeling. He wanted to follow up with an attack using Lucid Blade, but he could no longer move any of his limbs or the wings on his back. There was more than a minute left until time was up, though. If Urocyon recovered first and counterattacked, it was all over.
He had just one card left to play.
Scraping together what little remained of his mental strength, he prayed intently, Chiyu, now!!
There was no way this thought could reach her, and yet a green light flashed in the right corner of his view. A vivid lime-green beam of light shot forth from a gap in the rocky mountains standing to the northeast of the battlefield, and stretched out in a straight line.
Its target was neither Haruyuki nor Urocyon but was the thing that had once been the left leg of the gray statue in the center of the intersection—the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca.
Right before they’d descended from Ecomuse Town, Haruyuki had asked three things of Chiyuri. One was to absolutely not do anything reckless. The second was, if the battle turned into a free-for-all, to find Cotton Marten among the survivors and leave through the Sunshine City portal. And the third was an instruction that envisioned a situation where Haruyuki and the blue Drive Linker ended up fighting one-on-one.
I’ll do whatever it takes to create an opening of ten seconds. When I do, you cast Citron Call on the remains of Tezcatlipoca.
Chiyuri was carrying out that final instruction. In which case, Haruyuki also had to keep his own promise.
Before him, the plummeting Urocyon shuddered violently as he quickly regained consciousness, and then yanked his lolling head up. He was still a werewolf, and the aura encasing his claws was also still there.
The beast’s eyes narrowed suspiciously for a mere heartbeat and then flew open wide. He’d seen the green light cutting across the red landscape and realized that it meant something critical.
Given that Urocyon could move by kicking at the air itself, he would probably be able to get to Chiyuri in five seconds or less.
“Raaah!” the werewolf howled and pulled back his legs in preparation for a jump.
Haruyuki tried to turn his sword on him. But his right hand was numb, and it was all he could do to keep hanging on to the hilt of his beloved blade.
At Urocyon’s feet, the compressed air shuddered in a ring shape.
Crow! Use my wings!
Abruptly, a voice—no, a mind—flashed like lightning and shot through the core of his own mind. At the same time, he felt a faint warmth spring up in the wings on his back, not Silver Crow’s metallic fins but the Enhanced Armament Metatron Wings attached to the upper part of his shoulder blades.
This modest energy changed into instantaneous power, and Haruyuki cried out in a hoarse voice, “Ektenia!!”
His right wing became a beam of dazzling light that carved a large arc in the sky as it streaked out to attack Urocyon.
But the Drive Linker showed no signs of panic. He stayed tense, in position, and then kicked at the air at the last possible second.
Just when Haruyuki thought Urocyon had evaded him, and when Urocyon no doubt also thought that he had dodged the blow, the beam of light turned at an impossibly sharp angle and shot through the werewolf’s left shoulder.
Ektenia changed the Metatron Wings into beams of light, a fixed attack of the Enhanced Armament itself and not an Incarnate technique. So for a second, Haruyuki feared that it would not pierce Urocyon’s Incarnate defenses and would instead be ripped apart like a piece of paper. But while the ribbon of light extending from Haruyuki’s back did bend in the impact, it was not destroyed.
Showers of sparks flying, Ektenia and Urocyon froze together at a single point in space.
Skreeenk! There was a sound like space itself shattering, and then both were thrown back with incredible force.