✦ ✦ ✦
Unable to absorb the blowback from the ribbon of light, Haruyuki dropped in a tailspin. Thirty seconds remained until his five minutes were up, but this time, his energy was well and truly spent.
Chiyu, it’s up to you now.
Sending up one last silent prayer, Haruyuki crashed into the ground and rolled along the surface for an indeterminate amount of time before finally coming to a stop. His health gauge was at 10 percent.
Desperately clinging to consciousness and pushing back the darkness that tried to swallow him up, Haruyuki somehow managed to turn his head. The stone statue rising up forty meters ahead of him was enveloped in a faint green light. The nine Drive Linkers encamped on the top of it should have noticed the change, but they were in Haruyuki’s blind spot, and he couldn’t see them.
Citron Call, the special attack of Chiyuri—Watch Witch, aka Lime Bell—had the fearsome power to rewind time or lasting status changes. She had activated Mode I here to rewind time. Normally, she used this to recover her comrades’ health or special attack gauges, or to heal damage. She had never turned this power on an Enemy.
But she had once used this technique to take back the burst points stolen from Blood Leopard by the God Seiryu. Which meant that she had changed the status of a Super-class Enemy, albeit indirectly, and in that case, maybe she could also have an effect on Tezcatlipoca, given that it was the same category of Enemy. Or so Haruyuki thought.
Naturally, his aim was not Tezcatlipoca’s recovery. True, if the Enemy was revived, the Drive Linkers would also be gone, but it was hard to say which threat was worse. Not to mention that to completely revive a creature this enormous, Chiyuri would need a support squad as big as or even bigger than the team formed to attack the Sun God Inti.
What Haruyuki had planned was not recovery but repair—to rewind the level of destruction just a bit.
Countless lumps of small and large rocks sat at the foot of the stone statue. A green light wrapped around 20 percent of them, and just as he noticed this, the rocks danced up into the sky, in defiance of the law of gravity. They glued themselves to the upper cross section of the statue with a dull clattering noise, and the cracks between them vanished instantly.
“Dammit! What the hell?!” came an understandably panicked cry, together with the sound of slight footsteps. The blue werewolf was racing animal-like along the east side of the intersection toward the source of the green light. He no doubt intended to stop Chiyuri, but he was too late.
While Urocyon was still in the middle of the intersection, the light of Citron Call flickered and disappeared. Chiyuri’s special attack gauge was empty. The issue was whether Haruyuki’s plan had succeeded or not. And in order to find that out, he needed to take a look at the top of the stone statue, but he was still too weak to stand up, much less fly. Still, he pushed on the ground with a trembling hand and somehow managed to sit up.
Keen, keen, doooong. The metallic ring of clear chimes poured down on him from nowhere in particular, followed by a flat voice.
“Five minutes have passed, Fang.”
Instantly, Urocyon slid to a screeching halt as he raced along on all fours. The werewolf stood up on two legs, and the aura emanating from it became a bright-blue pillar of flames, which melted into the air and disappeared.
Once again small-statured and wearing a blue mask, the Drive Linker bent his neck from right to left and back again in a stretch before looking up at the red sky.
Haruyuki also turned his gaze upward to find a human figure dancing down soundlessly from the top of the stone statue.
Unlike Urocyon’s uncontrolled leap, this was a leisurely descent at a fixed speed, reminiscent of Centaurea Sentry’s Feather Fall ability, but Haruyuki felt something off in the way the cloak swung around the body. It seemed like rather than the speed of descent being controlled, the flow of time was slower around only this person.
Abruptly, the cloak flapped loudly, and the person dropped the last three or so meters at a normal speed to land on the ground.
They cut a strange figure. Two meters tall, but strangely slender, and completely covered from neck to toe by the black cloak. Only their head was exposed, but that head was bizarre—a machine. Brass gears and flywheels whirled and spun with a faint klak klak, packed into a silver frame. It resembled Elinvar Governor of Prominence’s Steel faction, but this head had far and away more moving parts.
The gear avatar looked around with a face that had neither eyes, nose, nor mouth, and then began to walk, the hem of their black cloak flapping. The Exercitus survivors stared from where they stood around the edges of the intersection, their number increased now to about seventy, thanks to the ongoing regenerations. But the avatar let their gaze slide over them like a breeze blowing past as they cut across the large intersection and came to stand in front of Urocyon.
“Honestly,” they sighed, their voice tinged with a mechanical vibration. “It’s truly shocking that you can’t even take care of a single level six using such flashy Psion.”
Here, Haruyuki finally realized that the gear avatar was who Urocyon had called out to in order to find out the time remaining, the person he’d called “Complicator.” Haruyuki knew that “complicate” was English for making something more complex or worse, and there was no doubt that the design of that head was the most complicated of any avatar he’d seen in the Accelerated World.
“Hmph,” Urocyon snorted, in a very obviously sarcastic manner. He jerked the thumb of his left hand toward the statue. “That light beam, it was some kind of healing or reversing power, yeah? What happened up top?”
“The rocks came flying up from the ground and buried the portal,” the gear avatar replied. “We tried to destroy them, but even with Steel’s punch, we couldn’t break them.”
“For real?” Urocyon replied with genuine surprise. “So what happened to the others?”
“Force made the decision they should return to DD before the portal was completely buried. While small, there is nevertheless a possibility that we will be locked up here.”
The instant he heard these words, Haruyuki let out the breath he’d been holding. This was precisely what he’d been aiming for when he’d asked Chiyuri to use Citron Call to rewind time for the statue. He’d hypothesized that if they could rebuild two meters of the crumbling rocky mass, then maybe the red portal the Drive Linkers had come through would be buried. In which case, they would probably choose to return to the DD world.
His plan had more or less been a success, but he did wonder why Complicator had chosen to remain on this side.
Urocyon bluntly lobbed that very question at them. “So how come you didn’t go back, Wheel?”
“It’s your fault, Fang,” Complicator replied coolly. “You asked me to tell you when the count reached zero, yes? I despise changes to a schedule once it’s been set.”
“Oh, right, yeah. Sorry ’bout that.” Urocyon waved the stump of his right arm apologetically and glanced at the statue once more. “Well, if we smash up that pile of rocks, the portal should show again.”
“I don’t know about that.” Complicator shrugged in sheer exasperation. “Although the situation is such that we have no choice but to try.”
Abruptly, a resolute voice rang out across the field. “I’m not letting you do that!”
The Drive Linkers whirled around, and Haruyuki said, groaning, “Why did you show yourself?!”
But it was already too late.
Marching forcefully toward them from the east side of the intersection was an F-type avatar with a large bell-shaped Enhanced Armament on her left arm and a wide-brimmed triangular hat on her head—Lime Bell.
When she stopped more or less in front of Urocyon and Complicator, who had their backs turned to Haruyuki, Lime Bell/Chiyuri threw the head of her small avatar back and shouted again.
“I mean, what is your guys’ deal even! Giving us our final notice? Coming in here and talking like you’re all that! If you’re gonna duel, the rule is bright, fun, and polite!”
“…”
The Drive Linkers appeared to be stunned into silence.
Haruyuki was similarly at a loss for words. Even among Burst Linkers, politeness and manners were expected only in a normal duel. If they encountered each other in the Unlimited Neutral Field, they would instantly and without question start in on slaughtering. Not to mention that Urocyon and Complicator were invaders from another world, and the Burst Linkers should really have just been glad they even gave their names first.
Haruyuki’s thoughts were interrupted by a voice as cold as ice.
“Fun duel? What kind of nonsense…? This is no longer a game, miss. It’s a fight for survival.” It was Complicator who spoke. The flywheels on their head clicking away, they glared at Chiyuri. “If we win, your world will disappear. If you win, our world will disappear. This is the immutable rule decided on by whoever created and maintains the two games. We have no interest in losing DD2047, and you all don’t intend to abandon BB2039, I assume. In which case, all that remains is for us to fight, yes?”
Their polite tone reminded Haruyuki of Glacier Behemoth, aka Rioh Koshimizu, but the mechanical edge erased any note of humanity. The question of whether they were really a Linker flitted through his mind, but the instant he digested Complicator’s words in his own way, that doubt flew out of his head.
“…!”
He drew a sharp breath, still slumped down on the ground.